Closing the Gaps in India's Cashless Infrastructure
DCB Bank's Prasanna Lohar on Establishing a Thorough Testing Process
While the cashless initiative in India is spearheaded by the government, all development and design work being undertaken by all participants needs to follow a thorough testing process to plug security and fraud gaps, says Prasanna Lohar of DCB Bank (see: Building a Secure Cashless Economy).
See Also: Expel: Firms Still Threatened by Old Vulnerabilities
"Cashless payments is not a service provided by a single entity - it is an ecosystem involving multiple stakeholders," he says. "While everyone might have individually tested their applications, when there is a deep interoperability between institutions, there is a need for a testing science and through test cases need to come out to plug the gaps in the ecosystem."
Some of the real-world challenges that financial institutions are facing from a security point of views stem largely from the fact that holistic security of the ecosystem was not given as much emphasis as functionality in the initial roll-out phase, he says (see: A New Approach to Authentication for a Cashless Economy).
In a video interview at Information Security Media Group's recent New Delhi Fraud and Breach Prevention Summit, where Lohar was a panelist, he discusses:
- Ecosystem gaps and the challenge in closing them;
- The need for an overarching and iterative testing science;
- Recommendations for how to overcome security challenges.
Lohar is head - IT at DCB Bank. He has over 16 years of industry experience. As part of DCB's digital transformation, he is closely associated with emerging technology assimilation, experimentation, robust architecture implementation, FinTech and startup alignment, open innovation practices, collaboration with other banks on blockchain initiatives.
