Building relationships within the tech community
The MAG offers the payments tech community an opportunity for ongoing networking, learning, and engagement through participation in MAG committees, communities, webinars, and in-person events. Discuss shared challenges such as modernizing payments platforms, optimizing payments processes, combating fraud, and increasing data security. The technology community brings together viewpoints across the top merchants in the country, leading technology providers, and industry experts.
MAG Insights: 2024 W3C TPAC Recap
Enterprise Payment Evolution: Strategies for Global Growth_1-21-25
Explore the trends redefining how businesses manage payments. This session will cover strategies enterprises can use to grow their business...
Adopting and Implementing Payment Account Reference (PAR)
Events
Tech Forum
The MAG Tech Forum is aligned with the MAG bi-annual conference, offering education and networking opportunities for payments IT professionals. As payments technology evolves, the MAG Tech Forum connects payments technology experts and leading providers to explore innovative applications of these advancements.
The MAG Tech Forum aims to foster collaboration, provide tech-focused knowledge, and build relationships between merchants, their payments IT and business teams, and technology providers.
Tech-focused payment content:
|
|
Top 5 reasons to attend the Tech Forum
Tech Forum Sponsorship
Tech Forum Sponsorship offers the opportunity to network and engage with the top retailers in the country. Conferences and webinar sessions are designed for IT professionals to provide attendees with the latest insights needed to understand and use new and emerging technologies in payments.
The Tech Forum Executive Advisory Council along with the support of Tech Forum sponsors will influence the payments technology topics relevant to the membership and included in these Tech Forum sessions. The sessions will discuss how these payments technologies can play a role in creating a more frictionless payments experience for consumers as well as supporting merchants delivering value added services as part of overall commerce.
Tech Forum Sponsor Benefits
Meet our Tech Forum Sponsors
Allies and Partnerships
The MAG engages with several organizations that develop, maintain, and influence the standards and specifications that underpin the payments ecosystem. Once published, how they are implemented by different payments stakeholders can have a profound impact on the operations and the regulatory and network compliance of merchants. In this section, we highlight topics that may be of significant interest to merchants.
CURRENT UPDATES
W3C/FIDO Alliance
W3C: An international public-interest non-profit organization that develops standards and guidelines to help everyone build a web-based on the principles of accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security. FIDO: An open industry association with a focused mission: reduce the world’s reliance on passwords.
The W3C Web Authentication (WebAuthn) standard was developed in coordination with the FIDO Alliance and is a core component of the FIDO2 Project along with FIDO’s Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP specification).
- W3C published Verifiable Credentials 2.0 as a W3C Standard with the goal of making expression, exchange, and verification of digital credentials easier and more secure. For more information, the W3C press release can be found at https://www.w3.org/press-releases/2025/verifiable-credentials-2-0/.
X9/ISO
X9: An open body that develops and maintains voluntary consensus standards for the U.S. financial services industry. ISO: A network of national standards bodies that develops and publishes international standards on everything from screw threads to quantum key distribution.
X9 represents the United States on two ISO technical committees related to financial services and their subcommittees.
- A recording of the X9 webinar, “The Other Side of Payment Innovations,” held on June 25 is now available at https://x9.org/asc-x9-webinar-the-other-side-of-payments-innovation.
- On June 13, a signing ceremony for the first-ever X9 Financial PKI root certificates was held. With the root certificates now created, production X9 Financial PKI certificates will be available beginning June 19, 2025. The first use case will address client authentication (mTLS) challenges.
USPF/IAF
USPF: A cross-industry body that enables open exchange of expertise and information to solve problems and help realize innovations that make payments more efficient, simple, and secure. IAF: A cross-industry body dedicated to the development, advancement, and adoption of secure identity technologies, including physical and logical access.
Both organizations operate within the Secure Technology Alliance, an association that encompasses all aspects of secure digital technologies.
- The USPF has published the first installment of a 3-D Secure miniseries. This installment covers the fundamentals of 3DS; how it works, practical use cases, benefits and challenges. The brief can be found at https://www.uspaymentsforum.org/emv-3ds-mini-series/.
EMVCo
A global technical body that creates and manages the EMV® Specifications to enable interoperable and secure card-based payments.
- A Special Interest Meeting on Chip Cryptography was held on July 1. Topics covered included the role of cryptography in chip payment security, RSA key lengths and the annual key length assessment and a review of some worked examples of different cryptographic functions.
- A Special Interest Meeting on Payment Account Reference (PAR) for network tokenization will be held on July 22. The MAG will present on the US market view of PAR.
FDX
The Financial Data Exchange (FDX) is a non-profit industry standards body operating in the U.S. and Canada dedicated to unifying the financial services ecosystem around a common, interoperable, and royalty-free technical standard for user-permissioned financial data sharing.
- A General Members call will be held on July 8 to provide updates on industry developments in the US and Canada and details on key workstreams.