Keying in on Secure Credit Card Processing
Keying in on Secure Credit Card Processing
What is PCI and why is it important?
Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) compliance is important to organizations that want to accept payment cards or transmit, process or store payment card data.
Becoming PCI compliant also protects an organization should a data breach ever occur and cardholder data become leaked. To reduce the associated risk, PCI compliance is mandated by companies processing credit cards and other protected data to help ensure the security of credit card transactions in the payments industry.
Who sets PCI standards?
The PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) touches the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Founded in 2006 by American Express, Discover, JCB International, Mastercard and Visa Inc, they maintain, evolve and promote PCI standards for the safety of cardholder data across the globe.
The PCI SSC serves those who work with payment cards including merchants of all sizes, financial institutions, as well as hardware and software developers who create the global infrastructure for processing payments.
What does the PCI Security Standards Council do?
The PCI SSC has two key priorities for their work. They help merchants and financial institutions implement standards for security policies, technologies and ongoing processes that protect their payment systems from breaches and theft of cardholder data.
They also help vendors understand and implement standards for creating secure payment solutions.
How does Mavro help meet PCI requirements?
Credit card data always needs to be encrypted when processing it. For those using Mavro’s Encryption Plus module, that is not an issue. Data is instantly encrypted within the MavBridge™ ecosystem as part of a credit card workflow.
The challenge comes when transferring credit card information out of the data entry PC’s memory to an application downstream. Without additional security integration in place, card information can become vulnerable at this point.
How to address this challenge?
By integrating the ID Tech encrypted keypad into MavBridge™. This unique keypad is PCI compliant and supported by Bluefin®, a recognized leader in credit card payment and data security.
Only after all credit card information is keyed and the enter button pressed, is an encrypted packet of data transmitted into MavBridge™. The packet includes only a minimal amount of plain text data for display. This means the encrypted data is never available for access during data entry and subsequently, MavBridge™ never has access to sensitive data.
What are the advantages of secure credit card processing?
Since the information entered into the device during keying is fully encrypted before transmission, the encrypted packet can be securely written to an output file or communicated to a downstream process for further processing.
This helps companies integrate with Bluefin® to securely obtain authorizations and payments outside of MavBridge™. This unique feature extends our end-to-end security promise by eliminating additional touchpoints to maintain efficient credit card processing.