With ever-expanding payments innovations your payments security protocol is vital. In a broad sense, payments security is not only a business necessity, but also touches emotional components of safely guarding sensitive information for your organization, as well as your members. Making sure no one sees your pin number is no longer sufficient. So how can you know for sure your organization’s payments are secure? Read below where we break down the various aspects of payments security to avoid the costs of a security breach, and help you choose a robust system best suited to your business practices.
PCI Security Standards
Payments security is designed to address the safety needs of you and your members. With the growing demand of credit card processing through the 20th century, and the increasing popularity of online payments in the 21st century, these safety measures have had to adapt. That is why the four major credit card companies; Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover, joined forces to create the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI). Since its inception in 2004, PCI has seen eight updates that better define the needs of all merchants. Split in to four levels based on the number of annual transactions, PCI Compliance is an industry standard that protects a diversity of business types and their customers.
Tokenization
Because storing credit card information is vital to many businesses, PCI compliant merchants follow strict guidelines on properly storing credit card numbers. Storing this information creates increased risk for CC theft. To protect consumers from fraud, merchants who store credit card numbers are required to use a complex code that replaces and hides sensitive information in what is called a token. Tokenization is then the procedure payments systems engage to process payments from a stored CC. Many payments processors have cutting edge innovations that creatively harnessed the power of tokenization to add benefits to merchants. This can include software that helps avoid missed payments, swiftly resolved chargeback disputes, and automatically update CC information.
Your Line of Comfort
The security protocols for your organization should translate to a sense of comfort. You’ll feel at ease armed with up-to-date information including accessible financial records on your payments processing. These reports should range from quick daily bites of information to the more complex documentation that outlines robust records on your organization’s daily, weekly, monthly, and annual payments.
Whether you’re storing CC numbers on paper, or exploring options to expand your organization’s payments security protocols, consider Gains to process your payments. As a level 1 PCI compliant payment service handling more than 6 million transaction annually, Gains has state-of-the-art tokenization capabilities offering the best defense against fraud. We offer an integrated and user-friendly system within your existing software, providing easy access to the vital information to help you ensure your payments are protected.