MasterCard has launched an innovative solution to harness the mobile phone as a form factor for its Chip Authentication Program. The initiative focuses on enabling consumers to authenticate their banking and online transactions through their own mobile phone with solutions from three leading industry vendors, and one of these vendors is Logos.

MasterCard’s CAP program (Chip Authentication Program) focuses on solutions that allow cardholders to authenticate themselves using their existing EMV banking card and a personal card reader. The reader, normally issued by a bank, generates a single-use password that can be used for e-banking transactions, e-commerce, telephone authentication or a whole host of other uses where the customer is not face-to-face with the bank or merchant – transactions termed as ‘card not present’.

New solution focuses on the use of the mobile phone for the generation of a dynamic password. Additionally the solution allows part of the transaction to be included in the generation of a password – this means that banks can enable cardholders to create a unique signature for a transaction. Such developments represent considerable armor against “phishing” and ‘man in the middle’ attacks – a growing problem in e-banking and e-commerce.