If you're a Corvair enthusiast, you likely get the title's reference to Ralph Nader's book that polemically accused manufacturers of resistance to the advancement of automotive safety. Shift your thoughts from automobiles, axles, and bumpers to payments, cyberattacks and data breaches. Then consider this question—if we successfully speed up payments, is payment safety more likely to advance or retreat?

I hear the question often. Since I first blogged about this topic in January, I've attended several conferences set in the context of building a better, faster, more efficient payments system. If the conversation hasn't gone straight to "safety," the topic has surely been broached before closing. The answers that presenters offer, in terms of how we make payments more secure, remain unchanged from earlier this year. The updated summary follows.

  • Innovate. Make full use of such things as biometrics and tokenization. Do not fear but rather make use of the best things coming from the cryptocurrency world.
  • Collaborate and coordinate. Share everything, taking full advantage of groups of all types to facilitate deployment and spread of best practices, among other things.
  • Prevent and plan. In a continuous and ever-improving activity, make use of such things as enhanced threat detection and continue to layer security measures. Also, educate fully, across the spectrum of both providers and users.
  • Track and report. We must do more of this in a frank, transparent way and it must be timelier.

Emphasizing and pursuing all these goals is still right in my view, yet something seems missing. I believe what's missing is a more expansive, easily accessible law enforcement regime—something that more closely parallels what's available for conventional crime fighting.

There has been good news, of late, in that various law enforcement agencies have both apprehended and successfully prosecuted cybercriminals of all sorts. What's important about this is, as law enforcement has more success, there is hope that miscreants will have an increasing expectation of getting caught. Let's assume a drop in crime rates is highly correlated to the likelihood or certainty of being caught. Self-test the theory by thinking of it this way. How often do you exceed the speed limit (answer silently to yourself). Now consider—how often do you speed when a patrol car is in the lane right next to you? It's imperative that law enforcement continue to evolve and improve such that the criminals who contemplate cybercrime increasingly anticipate they'll be caught.

The cliché that faster payments will mean faster fraud if we don't have faster security is somewhat beside the point. The fact is cybercrime has been and remains a material and looming threat. The world is all but fully a digital one and that means our police have to be able to put more—and more effective—digital patrol cars on the digital highway. Until then, to varying extents, payments are likely to be unsafe—at any speed.

Photo of Julius Weyman By Julius Weyman, vice president, Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed