ETA Joins World Wide Web Consortium To Make Online Payments More Secure

AMY ZIRKLE

There is no doubt that the payments ecosystem will continue to leverage new and future technologies. As a consumer, and self-professed “payments geek,” envisioning what that future would look like, and the ways in which you might be able to engage in the world of commerce is frankly exciting (I did warn you I was a payments geek :-).

Without question, the electronic commerce space offers a compelling business model for payments. To that end, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently launched a Web Payments Working Group that is charged with working to make payments more secure and easier on the web.

The W3C serves as a standards setting body for the web; however, much of the work of the group centers on the notion of “open standards” thereby enabling interoperability and compatibility across services provisioned on the web. The Web Payments Working Group is focused specifically on ways to streamline payments in the online world, make them easier and more secure. Participation in the working group represents a cross-section of interested constituencies including technology companies, banks, merchants, equipment manufacturers, mobile operators, and payment service providers.

ETA is excited be a part of this important initiative. A significant number of ETA member companies are directly engaged in the business of facilitating and enabling online commerce and advancing the use of digital payments.

The work of the Web Payments Working Group will serve to address the development of a common baseline open standard for APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that provides for an easier and more secure payment experience. The objective is to ensure that these APIs enable optimal use of a range of payment instruments including cards, mobile devices, new technologies (such as blockchain) and mechanisms yet to come, with the goal of facilitate and foster growth of an interoperable, competitively robust, and rigorously secure web payments market.

It is likely that as the work stream of the working group evolves, additional issues will be brought to light including ways to consider further issues that leverage the ecommerce platform to support innovation and new services. It has also not gone unnoticed by ETA that there are many other industry standards and specification organizations and general industry initiatives that touch upon some of the work of the W3C, especially with an eye towards enhancing payment security and maximizing network interoperability.

By virtue of our involvement in other industry arenas, ETA plans to leverage its presence across these different groups to ensure synergies or work efforts and enable opportunities for coordination and even collaboration with other groups when and if the opportunity arises.

As ETA continues its work with the Web Payments Working Group, we love forward to working on behalf of member companies to advance any specific issues of concern or interest to our member companies. We will be providing updates to our members and if there are questions by any interested company, happy to discuss in greater detail.

I’m always happy to discuss this and other matters with my fellow payment geeks out in the world, so feel free to contact me.