Press
NAFCU welcomes Matz’s Call for retailer accountability in data breaches
WASHINGTON, DC (December 9, 2014) – National Association of Federal Credit Unions (NAFCU) President and CEO Dan Berger said the association welcomes National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) Board Chairman Debbie Matz’s call for retailer accountability for data security breaches on their end so credit unions and other financial institutions aren’t left to foot the bill.
“We thank Chairman Matz for joining in NAFCU’s long-held conviction that retailers and merchants must be held accountable for data breaches, and we thank her for her leadership on the issue,” said Berger. “We look forward to making progress toward legislation that would help protect credit union members from continuing data breaches by holding retailers to account through national data security standards.”
Matz, during a Metropolitan Area Credit Union Management Association event attended by Berger and other senior staff Monday night, highlighted the fact that credit unions are held to a national data security standard under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act but that retailers are not. Matz also said cybersecurity will continue to be a supervisory priority for NCUA. She said the agency wants credit unions “to implement controls to better detect cyber-attacks, to better protect themselves and their members and to better recover from those attacks.”
NAFCU was the first financial trade group to ramp up the call for national data security standards for retailers in the wake of last year’s Target breach. It is a member of the Payments Security Task Force, a diverse group of participants in the payments industry focused on EMV chip implementation, including ways to help reduce testing and implementation time, as well as driving a discussion on payments system security. It is also a member of the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council and the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which work on infrastructure cybersecurity.
The National Association of Federal Credit Unions is the only national trade association that exclusively represents the interests of federally chartered credit unions before the federal government and the public.