PCI Compliant Merchant Services
To take credit cards as a means of payment, retailers must adhere to PCI compliance criteria. Merchants who do not comply risk facing penalties and other consequences.
PCI is an acronym that stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect. The key brands: MasterCard, Visa, Discover, JCB, and American Express are represented by this abbreviation, which stands for Payment Card Industry. They came together in 2006 to produce a set of standards for data security and protection in payment processing, which became known as PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard).
What does PCI compliance entail? Any business or merchant that accepts, transmits, or keeps any cardholder data, regardless of its size or number of transactions, must adhere to the specified set of criteria. The whole Primary Account Number (PAN) or the full PAN plus any of the following items is referred to as cardholder data.
- Cardholder name
- Expiration date
- Expiration date
- Service code
- Sensitive Authentication Data (SAN), which must also be protected, includes full magnetic stripe data, CAV2, CVC2, CVV2, CID, PINs, PIN blocks and more.
Credit card issuers enforce this compliance, and each brand has its own set of fines and penalties. If your company is not PCI compliant, you will be evaluated in the event of a data breach. Merchant banks are likewise concerned about PCI compliance, and failure to comply could result in the loss of your merchant account. You wouldn’t be able to process any credit card transactions as a result of this.
The compliance criteria are divided into four levels based on transaction volume: Level 4 has less than 20,000 annual transactions, while Level 1 has more than 6 million. Merchants may be required to be reviewed by a third party, complete self-assessments, and provide various sorts of documentation depending on their level of compliance. Using an online payment gateway to help with PCI compliance could help you save time and money. To protect critical consumer payment information, Solid State Processing employs payment tokenization technology.
It’s critical to understand your merchant account agreement, which should spell out your obligations. Solid State Processing account managers have over 18 years of expertise and are available to answer your concerns and offer you with the tools and information you need to stay PCI compliant. Please contact us for more information.
