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my credit card is occasionally denied at the time of purchase, requiring me to
telephone the call center for security veriication. I remember talking to a support
line three times from India, with each call taking ten minutes or longer. The
overall cost of such a call, including telephone charges, the call center agent's
time, and my time, adds up signiicantly.
While I am thankful to the credit-card company for taking my card secur-
ity seriously, I was curious whether there was an easier way for them to deal
with this situation. I asked the credit-card call center agent how I could make
the credit-card company's monitoring easier, and the response was to call them
before each trip. This solution might reduce the number of times my credit card
is denied; however, it would signiicantly increase the call-center costs. Plus, I
would have to make a call every time I traveled, which could be a lot more calls
than the number of times my personal credit card is used.
The premise for credit-card fraud is that someone could steal my credit card
and use it. A typical fraud rule looks for an unusual purchase initiated in a new
international location. Unfortunately, for frequent travelers like me, irregular
personal credit-card use can easily mimic these fraudulent transactions. How-
ever, I carry a smartphone all the time when I travel. Although my credit-card
company may not know of my travel to distant geographies, my smartphone has
full awareness of my location. Also, the chances of my losing both my credit card
and my phone are signiicantly lower, and even if someone picked up both, it is
highly unlikely they would travel with both credit card and smartphone to make
fraudulent purchases. If only I could authorize my credit-card company to check
my phone location each time there is a concern about the credit-card usage, and
even download an app to my phone that could ask me to authorize the charges
using a secure login or password to eliminate the possibility of my phone being
stolen at the same time.
Financial institutions are rapidly using smartphones for banking transactions.
Today, Chase offers mobile check deposit using the Apple iPhone (see
https://
www.chase.com/online/services/check-deposit.htm
). Using my iPhone camera,
I can take a picture of both sides of the check and then use the Chase Mobile app
on my iPhone to log into my account with a special authorization ID supplied by
Chase. Now that my phone and bank are aware of each other, they can use this
information for a variety of applications to improve my customer experience.
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