By Paul French, VP, Product & Solutions Marketing, Axway

Credit cards aren’t going away anytime soon. The world may decide to adopt any number of Google Wallet-style solutions coming down the pike, but the fact is, when it comes to micropayments, the industry is not quite ready. And how long it will take to put the right payments infrastructure in place is anyone’s guess, especially given the raft of hardware implications and challenges.

The big challenge here is fairly obvious: We as consumers may like the idea of linking additional (affinity- or financial-based) content to our credit cards, and having that data traverse and/or connect to the networks in which our payments are being processed. But we must also consider the security of this data, and whether we necessarily want personally identifying, affinity-based info – such as purchase details – linked to our credit cards.

In a world where Global Payments has experienced a breach of 1.5 million credit card numbers, are you comfortable letting other parties link your purchases to the specific details of those purchases? Are you comfortable with other parties knowing not only that you bought an airline ticket, but that you went to Amsterdam, or not only that you bought groceries, but that you bought diapers and cold medicine?

As much as it’s interesting to consider how the human work flow – the way we do, buy, and consume things – can be a target for innovation, we must take an even deeper interest in the data security of those work flows. And we should expect the card issuers and networks involved to take an even deeper interest than we do, because it looks like we’re on the verge of trusting them with a great deal more information than ever before.