Online Payments More Secure Than Conventional Payments

The digital payment market is forecast to exceed $10 trillion by 2026.

Photo by bruce mars from Pexels

(SALEM, Ore.) - We live in a time when online payments have become pretty much the norm.

Eventually, stores installed card readers and then when the Internet made a boom and made its way into nearly every home and every business. Savvy investors and entrepreneur quickly realized the potential of online payments.

It seemed like an interesting idea in the early days of the Internet, and when you see how it caught on and how much of the payments volume is handled online nowadays, you will actually see that it was one of the most revolutionary ideas of the last century. It was a 20th century idea but its popularity really peaked in the 21st century.

It’s a large market

According to some estimates, the digital payment market is set to exceed $10 trillion by 2026. If you take any statistics, either for the global market, or particular countries you will notice one clear pattern, the amount of online payments is continuously on the rise.

The number of products and services that you can purchase online is also growing regularly. Basically, anything that you can pay for, can be paid online. In most cases, paying for a product online comes with the opportunity to have the product delivered to your door which makes shopping a lot more convenient and perhaps more importantly, saves time.

There were concerns at first

The first and the most genuine concern was safety. People weren’t sure whether online payments, will the money would reach the desired destination.The most serious concern was the option for third parties to obtain payment details which could enable them to divert the funds to their accounts or worse.

Nowadays we know how online payments are protected and payment providers ensure that payment information will not be accessed by anybody who’s not supposed to have access to it.

Encryption technology - SSL

First of all, even in an unlikely event where security protocols are reached and a third party gains access to payment details and manages to effectively steal money from an account, the transactions can be traced and it is possible to get your funds back, whereas if your wallet gets stolen, there’s very little chance that you will get it back.

But, let’s focus on security and why it is not likely to have your funds stolen online.

When discussing payment security, the first thing that should be considered is whether the site, i.e. the platform via which the payment is processed, is protected. If the site has an SSL certificate, that means that all information that is processed via the site, including credit card information and other sensitive data. This is the first sign that you can trust the site.

All sites that allow visitors to leave any sort of personal data tend to use SSL encryption technology, including payment providers, but also e-commerce sites, as well as sites that offer online bingo games or similar services.

All reputable sites these days are SSL encrypted, and we strongly advise you not to leave information with any site that doesn’t employ an SSL protocol.

PCI compliance and tokenisation

These standards let merchants know how they should secure sensitive data when processing payments.

Next, we have tokenisation, which enables authentication in a way that doesn’t endanger the whole transaction. Tokenisation further reduces the possibility of data breach which prevents the likelihood of identity theft or getting your funds stolen.

Even with this level of security, fraudsters are still trying to steal funds online and we will certainly continue to see improved and enhance security protocols being developed and implemented in the upcoming years.

Source: Salem-News.com Special Features Dept.