Business owners have a lot of choices to make when it comes to how they manage their company, interact with customers and accept/process payments. One non-negotiable option, however, is to become PCI compliant and follow PCI Compliance security standards.
Becoming PCI compliant is required for any business that accepts credit cards, which involves multiple layers of protection. This means ensuring you utilize the right tools and solutions to onboard merchant accounts and facilitate payments within your software platform using industry-wide security standards.
To prevent putting your business, and your customer’s data at risk, you should rely on products that ensure the highest level of PCI data security for processing payments — AKA, those that meet PCI DSS Level 1 compliance.
What Exactly Is PCI Compliance?
You’ll hear this term used frequently across the payments ecosystem, and while it’s a requirement for businesses to follow, it’s not often explained why.
PCI DDS, as it’s known, refers to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, and is designed to protect merchants and their customers by safeguarding card payment credentials. The need to be PCI compliant is directly related to the growing number of security breaches infiltrating businesses payments systems.
PCI Compliance standards apply to how your payments processing system accepts, stores and transmits your customer’s card data. Besides helping your business avoid unnecessary fees and fines, merchants that become PCI compliant receive peace of mind that their customers’ data is safe — which protects your business from worrying about potential lawsuits associated with data breaches.
If you don’t become PCI compliant, your reputation with customers may be harmed, and a security breach can be detrimental to your business’ bottom line because of the fees, fines and legal costs associated with such incidents.
Become PCI Compliant and Take Control of Your Payments
Following PCI Compliance standards matters beyond just protecting your customer’s data. It also matters when it comes to onboarding your merchant accounts — and settling your payments and funds.
Relying on electronic payment processing in today’s modern payments ecosystem is the only way to run your business efficiently. That’s why you need the right tools and solutions (like that offered by Payline) to ensure your merchant accounts, your business, and your customer’s payments are fully protected — from end to end.
When you become PCI compliant, you also gain better control over your own payments, including how you manage data. Businesses must rely on payments systems that don’t store sensitive cardholder data so your business is better protected from payment breaches.
Having a clear understanding of how payments data is transmitted across your systems, and between your merchant accounts, will help your business ensure it’s following PCI Compliance standards. The best way to know what’s happening? Having a payment processing partner like Payline equip your business with the right tools, software, and solutions to keep your business protected and compliant.
Anna Kragie is a content contributor for Payline Data. She previously wrote for PYMNTS.com, as a Sr. Content Producer, where she focused on financial services and payments innovation, fraud and security, emerging payments, and FinTech news, research and thought-leadership content across the payments industry.
