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About ShopSafe

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On December 1st, 2013, the RBI issued a mandate which made it mandatory for you to enter your ATM pin on the shopkeeper’s POS device (basically, a Point of Sale device is the debit card scanner) each time you make a purchase using your debit card.

Now, are you really comfortable inputting your pin on someone else’s device? Are you perennially concerned about the possibility of the security of your pin being compromised? Do you constantly worry about a security camera capturing you entering your pin? Do you ponder about the likelihood of a keylogger being installed on the POS device?

If you are worried, you’re not the only one. After all, in just two months following the introduction of this mandate, there have already been nine reported cases of pin theft. And while the number of unreported cases cannot be accurately predicted, one can say with a fair degree of certainty that the signs are worrying.

To address this very concern, five of us at the MITDI workshop in Mumbai designed a mobile application that would enable you to enter your ATM pin on your own smartphone, which is a device you trust. The app would take care of the rest – it would transfer the pin from your phone to the POS device in an encrypted format using Toshiba's Transfer Jet Technology (which wasn't out yet in the market at that time).

The fact that a customer is now entering his pin on his own phone, rather than on the vendor’s device greatly increases the security of the pin. Enabling the customer to enter the pin on his own device also increases customer satisfaction and increases the ease with which a customer can make card based payments.

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A little more

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