LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS SHANGHAI 2016: Security will be the critical enabler of IoT deployments as the average consumer’s confidence in IT systems has plummeted and concerns about privacy remain high across the world.

After the huge Sony and Target data breaches a couple of years ago, security emerged as an issue not just for the CIO but for a company’s entire board, said Oberthur Technologies CEO Didier Larouche (pictured).

“We won’t see any massive scale up of IoT usage unless the consumer is fully secure and his privacy is fully ensured. IoT security is vital to being able to scale up deployments,” he said.

Lamouche noted that two-thirds of financial fraud is done online. As billions of devices get connected to the internet, the opportunity for security problems increases manifold. By 2020 research indicates there will be 10 times more connected devices than smartphones sold each year, with many of the IoT devices not able to be updated over the air.

As IoT end-points expand, he believes a “payment of things” will emerge, with everything from your watch to your car able to make payments. For example, your self-driving car will be able to pay for fuel from the dashboard.

The impact of driverless cars will be huge, he said. In the US, where the average consumer spends one hour driving a day, an autonomous car will give people an extra hour a day for other things, and part of that will be consumption, which can add an additional 2 points to GDP growth.

He noted, however, that the world won’t have driverless cars until we have “absolutely secure payment for cars”.

Lamouche closed by emphasising the importance of collaboration. “No one can succeed alone, we should be working together to enable the ecosystem. OEMs, security providers and mobile operators must cooperate to develop standards and build the ecosystem.”