This has been a source of pain for credit cardpayment companies as well as banks as the credit card business represents a sizable part of their business models and the mobile paymentsystems were often advertised as significantly cheaper alternatives to the cardpaymentsystems.
As the analysts report, new Federal Reserve rules assert that alternative paymentsystems like PayPal are not paymentcard networks subject to a provision known as the Durbin amendment that caps interchange fees.
In the midst of that ongoing hacker pile-on, Sony has remained unwisely mum, says Jason Maloni, a crisis public relations executive at Levick Strategic Communications, which handled the response to Heartland PaymentSystems breach of as many as 100 million credit card numbers in 2009.
More recently, Heymann served as prosecutor in the case of a group of hackers involved in the unprecedented theft of hundreds of millions of credit card numbers from the networks of companies including TJ Maxx and Heartland PaymentSystems.
The scale of the Citi attack is hardly unusual, given that others at companies like TJX in 2007 or Heartland PaymentSystems in 2009 likely exposed more than a hundred times as many credit card accounts.