By Debra Berlyn

Long before she was elected to the United States Senate in November of 2012, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) consistently stood tall for consumers and the middle class and decried the questionable behavior of Wall Street banks. According to a recent report, now in Washington, Warren continues her mission, meeting with the Federal Reserve more twice as often than any other Senator.



While the focus of these conversations is clearly private, it begs the question: do they include the lackluster efforts of banks and credit card companies to issue more secure payment tools to consumers?

Given Senator Warren's track record of protecting consumers from financial traps, coupled with the support of her colleagues – Senators Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) – to exert pressure on agencies like the Fed and the financial industry itself, we should certainly hope so. If not, now is the time to press the issue with Janet Yellen and the Fed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the agency she helped build) and fellow members of Congress.

The Obama Administration and some policymakers on Capitol Hill continue newfound efforts to improve our credit and debit card security. Most notably, President Obama issued an Executive Order last fall calling for all federally-issued payment cards to be equipped with chip and PIN technology, a more modern and more secure system seen throughout the world. In the U.S., we currently use magnetic strips – which house our financial information similar to the way the film from a VHS tape houses the video – and sign for purchases.

Realizing that the magnetic strips are easily copied, the financial sector is finally trying to catch up with the rest of the globe, instituting chip-equipped cards. But the replacement effort still includes easily-forgeable signatures, providing little to no protection of our financial data once in the hands of cyber thieves.

"Most disappointing about the new system," CNN reports, "is that instead of pairing each card with a unique PIN (like the rest of the world), Americans will keep using their signature at checkout. The United States is way behind everyone else on chip-and-PIN: Europe did this in 2005; Africa did it in 2006. A PIN is safer, because only you know the code." It is also a greater protection for American businesses, who absorb less of a burden and risk when customers use a PIN.

Should a thief attempt to steal or counterfeit a chip and PIN card and proceed to use it to use it for an in-store purchase, it would be useless without knowledge of the PIN. Indeed, despite empirical evidence to back up the success of the two-prong technology, business leaders on Wall Street resigned to inadequate efforts in updating our payment tools.



Senator Warner of Virginia, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, scrutinized this trend in a letter to federal banking regulators earlier this year. Senator Warner expressed his frustration with chip and signature, questioning the path of the financial institutions when "better anti-fraud technology and authentication measures exists and indeed are prevalent in other countries." But Senator Warner shouldn't go at it alone.

Equipped with unique access to the Fed and a longstanding career advocating for and protecting consumers, Senator Warren should join us and support the implementation of chip and PIN. Moreover, she should work closely with banking regulators to the financial industry that Americans deserve better.

In recent weeks, two House Committees – Energy and Commerce and Oversight & Government Reform– have held hearings on data security. Representatives Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Peter Welch (D-VT) have already put forth bipartisan legislation that would institute a federal standard for data breach notification, but the debate on the data security entirely overlooked improved payment security.

Now is the time for Senator Warren to join this effort.. Consumers deserve the highest threshold of protection and they rely largely on the government to provide that assurance. Given her extensive background as a fearless consumer advocate, and with the support of her peers on Capitol Hill, an opportunity exists for Senator Warren to help provide those protections by championing chip and PIN.



Debra Berlyn is president of Consumer Policy Solutions and director of the Consumer Awareness Project. She is also the leader of ProtectMyData.org.

