Visa’s Richey warns on ‘over-sharing’
CONSUMER behaviour is a major contributor to online fraud, the chief risk officer at Visa warned at a major conference for the payments and financial technology sectors in Dublin.
Ellen Richey, chief risk officer at Visa, warned delegates at MoneyConf at the RDS that consumers are today “over-sharing online” and need to be more careful with their information.
Speaking about cyber security and data theft, Ms Richey said hacking can come from anywhere, from individuals to nation states. Online and digital fraud, whether through hacking or scams, is a major issue for the payments industry, and addressing it is a big source of potential business to fintech firms.
Opening day two of the event yesterday to a packed RDS, Web Summit co-founder and chief executive Paddy Cosgrave said it was “great” to be back.
It is the first major event by the Web Summit team since its main conference moved to Lisbon. Mr Cosgrave told the 5,000 delegates the group has always wanted a reason to come back to Dublin and that “MoneyConf is the perfect reason”.
Among the speakers yesterday was Sarah Friar, the Co Tyrone native and chief financial officer of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s $20bn (€17bn) payments company Square.
In her role, Ms Friar is setting a pace that has helped the company beat market expectations and triple its share price. She told delegates diversity in companies was not increasing with time, and companies need to push to implement this change.
She added that Square was continuing to expand this year, with the company “always looking” for acquisitions. “We are looking to Europe, we are always looking at the emerging markets, [however] China is a very different beast, it feels like a more tough market for Western companies to break into.”
Other speakers at the conference include the co-founder of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, and Kristo Käärmann, CEO of Transferwise, a peer-to-peer money-transfer service.
Ms Richey said businesses should isolate and aggressively protect parts of its data that could potentially cripple a company if exposed to a hacking.
“You can protect yourself and the standards are out there to tell you what to do,” she said.
Blockchain and cryptocurrency featured prominently yesterday, with a number of discussions on the subjects.
The conference is also playing host to a ‘Pitch’ event, MoneyConf’s start-up competition that brings together the most promising early-stage start-ups from around the world for a live on-stage pitching battle.
Under the terms of the competition, those participating must have received less than €3m in funding to-date.
During the three-day event, MoneyConf is also facilitating a series of pre-scheduled private meetings between investors and start-ups attending the event.
‘You can protect yourself and the standards are out there’