Community Banks Reissue Nearly 7.5 Million Payment Cards Following Home Depot Data Breach
Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) December 18, 2014 -- The Independent Community Bankers of America® (ICBA) today said that the nation’s community banks reissued nearly 7.5 million credit and debit cards at a total reissuance cost of more than $90 million as a result of the Home Depot data breach. ICBA’s survey of a sample of community banks also found that more than 4 percent of community banks reported fraud on accounts that were compromised by the April-September breach. This number would have been higher had community banks not reissued cards as quickly as they did.
“Community banks continue to absorb exorbitant costs due to data breaches, and they do so upfront because their primary concern is to protect their customers. However, this is money—
more than $90 million—that could be used for lending in local communities to homeowners, small business owners and budding entrepreneurs to spur local economic growth and stability,” said John Buhrmaster, ICBA chairman and president and CEO of 1st National Bank of Scotia, N.Y. “For this reason, we continue to advocate that the costs associated with data breaches be borne by the party that experiences the breach. Communities and customers should not suffer for the faults of retailers.”
ICBA continues to advocate key data security principles to Congress and the payment card networks. ICBA’s core principles include:
• the costs of data breaches should ultimately be borne by the breached party,
• all participants in the payments system—including merchants—should be subject to Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act–like data-security standards,
• a national data-security breach and notification standard should be implemented to replace the current patchwork of state laws,
• unnecessary barriers to effective threat-information sharing between law enforcement and the financial and retail sectors should be removed, and
• while community banks and other financial institutions continue to move to chip technology for debit and credit cards, these technologies alone may not have prevented the recent retailer breaches and do not protect against fraud in “card-not-present” transactions, such as online purchases.
More information on ICBA’s efforts and data-security resources for community banks and their customers are available on ICBA’s online security breach toolkit.
About ICBA
The Independent Community Bankers of America®, the nation’s voice for more than 6,500 community banks of all sizes and charter types, is dedicated exclusively to representing the interests of the community banking industry and its membership through effective advocacy, best-in-class education and high-quality products and services. For more information, visit http://www.icba.org.
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Aleis Stokes, Independent Community Bankers of America, +1 (202) 821-4457, [email protected]
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