John Mayleben, CPP, is a consultant to Michigan Retailers Association and is MRA’s retired senior vice president technology and new product development. He is a national expert on electronic payment processing and was the first person in Michigan and among the first in the nation to receive the Certified Payments Professional (CPP) designation from the national Electronic Transactions Association.
It is very interesting to watch how the credit card world changes over the years, especially in making customer data more secure in merchants’ hands.
When the industry began, about the only thing we ever worried about was someone stealing the carbon sales slips from the dumpster behind the store.
As merchants, we had the card data (on the imprinted slips that the customer signed) and we were tasked with saving and protecting that data.
Then came the age of the electronic terminal, but we still had imprinted slips to protect. Shortly after that, terminals were built with printers, but we still had the data on the terminal and the printed receipts.
Over the next 10 years we got better at protecting the data, but never really figured out a way to get out of the data warehousing business. That made us a big target for thieves trying to steal the data and sell it to other bad guys looking to cash in by stealing customers’ identities or produce counterfeit cards.
As one of the gangsters from the Roaring Twenties explained, when asked why he robbed banks, “Because it’s where the money is.” Merchants who stored and held card data became the place where the “money” was.
New Solutions
As we move toward the third decade of this new century, there are solutions being developed to eliminate the storage of card data in merchant locations.
This evolution makes it much harder for a business to become a victim of a data breach.
Solutions already have been developed that allow the traditional credit card terminal to speak to a payment gateway, which is housed at your credit card processor and not in your building. This removes all card data from your business location, forcing the bad guys to look elsewhere for data to steal.
A side benefit to this evolution is that, because the payment gateway is housed elsewhere, it also creates a disaster recovery plan for your payments info.
If something goes wrong with your terminal, the transactions already processed during the day are saved and handled for payment. This makes it easier and cheaper to recover from a terminal failure.
If you would like more information about this type of solution, reach out to one of our customer service representatives at 800.563.5981, option 2 to learn more.
