With the upcoming iPhone 6, Apple is said to be debuting a new mobile payments service that will take advantage of NFC technology to help facilitate the payments. Sounds good and straightforward, right? So what about security? What’s to stop a thief from intercepting your credit card details as you tap your phone against the scanner?
Well according to a report from Bank Innovation, Apple’s answer to that potential security issue could be the use of tokenization technology. For those unfamiliar with tokenization technology, it comes in a couple of different forms. For example your bank might provide you with a little gadget that generates a code whenever you need to make a payment or transfer via your account.
That number is generated and can only be used once, thus ensuring that even if your bank account was hacked, the thief would not be able to transfer funds out unless he/she had that token. That being said, it is unclear how Apple plans on handling the tokenization, but that is apparently one of the security measures that will be used.
It has also been widely assumed that Touch ID could play a role in authenticating the payments as well, but we guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Apple has in store for us on the 9th of September. So far we have heard how Apple has partnered up with several retailers and credit card companies, as well as negotiated with banks for lower credit card transaction fees.
