Charge Cards: Risk Management in the Contemporary Electronic Environment

Information technology must be a tool which facilitates business operations rather than a hindrance to achieving business goals. Applicative solutions have to provide required performances, risk control, simple integration and necessary flexibility for successful implementation. Contemporary information tools offer attractive features, but they are also a specific implementation challenge for management structures in the financial sector. In the new setting of information challenge, business persons must be far better technologically trained on the one hand, while on the other, the new technology must become much more human-oriented. The aim of such application is to define risk control in the approach to information technologies and organise risk protection techniques. The management of financial institutions must permanently reconsider, revise and update the risk management plan. In this, it is essential to establish the risks prevailing in the total integrated electronic trade environment. In the electronic environment, controls must be primarily preventive by nature. Numerous and varied potential threats endangering information systems, especially those that can be qualified as crime, unequivocally impose the need to build an adequate system for information system protection. Consequences are as unknown as the directions and possibilities of establishing completely new directions, or a new and less well-known payment facility such as digital money, i.e. charge cards. Only future will show whether it is the end of money as we know it, or the revolution of a new payment tool. It is a fact that the electronic market is here to stay.