Interswitch, an integrated payment and transaction processing company, says it has introduced a service to ensure safer web transactions for customers on its platforms.
In a statement on Thursday in Lagos, the company said its new “Safetoken’’ service would trigger `One-Time-Passwords’ (OTP), whenever customers were making payment transactions on the internet using their cards.
Mr Charles Ifedi, Director, Payment Solutions and Value Added Services (VAS), Interswitch, said that the service was in compliance with the Central Bank of Nigeria policy on the mandatory tokens for some web payments in Nigeria.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that OTP is additional level of authentication for customers when using their cards over the internet.
It provides added security for the cardholder and protects customers against unauthorised usage of their cards on the internet.
Ifedi said that the system would generate six to eight digits OTP whenever a transaction occurred via the Interswitch Web Payment Platform.
When a customer attempts to perform a web transaction above a set limit, say N3, 000 for airtime recharge, the customer is prompted for a One-Time-Password.
SMS containing OTP is sent to the customer’s pre-registered phone number. This number is pre-registered with the bank.
The Safetoken platform supports the use of hardware tokens, software tokens, grid cards and OTP delivered via SMS or email, he explained.
According to him, UBA had implemented the Safetoken SMS and email OTP solution for its customers. Ifedi said that other banks that were currently implementing the hardware and SMS OTP solution for their customers included Access Bank, GTBank, First Bank, FCMB and Zenith Bank.
Source: Leadership Ng
