CurrentC To Launch As Planned, Despite Recent Breach
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Recent hack attack will not delay the rollout of the new payment platform.
As the payment platform war heats up, the latest player in the conflict exudes confidence despite a recent glitch.
Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) CEO Dekkers Davidson announced that CurrentC, the new mobile wallet payment platform, will launch as planned in early 2015 despite a recent hack attack, according to Convenience Store News.
CurrentC partners CVS and Rite Aid previously boycotted tap-to-pay technologies like ApplePay and Google Wallet in favor of their own flavor of mobile payments. Other MCX retailers — including Walmart, the largest retailer in the United States — refused to accept the service from the outset, as they wait for the CurrentC system to launch.
MCX recently also published a blog post to clear up misconceptions about its technology and its aims as a company. Regarding the security of CurrentC, the blog post states: “the technology choices we’ve made take consumers’ security into account at every aspect of their core functionality.”
Recently, participants in the CurrentC pilot program received a warning from the consortium of anti-credit-card retailers called MCX, or Merchant Consumer Exchange stating that the program had been hacked, and the hackers accessed information of those registered.
Convenience Store News reported that Davidson confirmed the breach, but stated that hackers only accessed e-mail information from customers, and not sensitive data like credit card numbers or personal information. Further, Davidson assured, the hack attack did not occur in the cloud, where more important information is held, and CurrentC's mobile app remained unaffected.
Tech Crunch reported that many of the affected email address were actually dummy accounts used for testing purposes, limiting the number of actual end users whose information was compromised, as the solution was still in its pilot phases.
"It's unfortunate that some people think it's cool to hack a system," Davidson said during the conference call. "But we built the CurrentC platform expecting attacks. This will not impact the rollout of CurrentC."
When asked why CurrentC was targeted, Davison acknowledged he could only speculate., but responded: "When you poke at a large ecosystem like that, there will be attacks," said Davidson. "We will learn from it. It will not slow us down."
MCX is currently testing the CurrentC system in advance of a planned rollout in 2015. The system connects directly to a customer’s bank account, instead of using credit cards like Apple Pay, and seeks to add other options such as coupons and loyalty programs.
CurrentC allows consumers to pay for retail goods from their smartphones. It does not require near field communications technology and can be used on both Android and iOS phones, both much different than Apple Pay, which launched publicly on Oct. 20.