QCOSTARICA TECH – When you swipe a credit or debit card at the check-out counter or buy something with your card online, you give the merchant your card number so they can ask for approval from your card provider. The store (brick and mortar or online) often keeps car numbers on their services, where they repeatedly have been Apple Pay eliminates that exposure of your card number.
When you sign up for Apple Play, you can use your phone’s camera to take a picture of your card. Apple confirms the card with your bank, but then it deletes the photo, and the card number isn’t store on the phone or by Apple.
Instead, Apple Pay creates an encrypted string fo data called a device account number that stands in for your card. It gets stored on the phone in a special chip known as the Secure Element.
- Advertisement -
The device account number can’t be accessed by any application on the phone other than Apple Pay.
When it’s time buy something, the Secure Element coughs up the device account number and combines it with data about the transaction to create a unique code for that sale.
A payment processor such as Visa or MasterCard is able to recognize the device account number and the unique code, and it uses them to approve or reject the transaction. The merchant never sees the actual card number.
Apple didn’t invent the technology. But Apple Pay goes a step further of other payment services by combining secure elements like the iPhone’s Touch ID fingerprint sensor, which is used to unlock the phone.
This means you don’t have to bother entering a PIN to confirm a transaction, but someone who steals your phone would be out of luck.
Although the Costa Rican market has a long way to go before adopting and generalizing a system of mobile payments such as Apple Pay, national banks see its possibilities.
- Advertisement -
Instead of being a threat, national banks look at the new payment system as an ally to popularize the use of a card or a bank account. (See ElFinancierocr.com )