News from VeriFone Retail Payment Conference

This week, tekservePOS is attending Verifone’s 4th Annual Retail Payment Conference in St. Pete Beach, Fl. In my mind, Verifone has, more or less, taken advantage of the “perfect storm” surrounding the payment terminal industry to emerge as the premier provider of payment terminals and payment terminal technologies.

The conference has three track’s : 1) Payment Security, 2) Emerging Technologies and 3) PCI Standards. I will be following and reporting back on Emerging Technologies. Thus far, we’ve heard from five general speakers ranging on topics from Mobile Payment trends, Contactless Payment adoption, Emerging Security Threats and from Bob Carr, President of Heartland Payment Systems on his personal “call to action” to the industry to unite up to the top 250 retailers with the goal of achieving a more comprehensive plan and approach to security.

Most compelling and of immediate attention in my mind is the rush that we are all seeing to convert from the single DES (DES) to the triple DES (TDES) encryption standard. While some don’t see a big reason to move from single DES, it HAS been compromised and thus, many or planning TDES conversions for 2009 and 2010. Shockingly, the government has only certified the TDES through 2010 with the advanced encryption standard (AES) being approved through the year 2030. This leads to the obvious question, “why are we solving our problems a few years at a time? Why aren’t we leapfrogging and planning for the AES encryption standard instead?"