PCI (Payment Card Industry) Compliance helps to better protect your business from embarrassing mishaps, as well as better protect your customers overall security and exists to protect personal information and ensure security when transactions are processed using a payment card. All member of the Payment Card Industry (financial institutions, credit card companies and merchants) must comply with these standards if they want to accept credit cards. Failure to meet and maintain compliance standards can result in fines from credit card companies and banks and even the loss of the ability to process credit cards. This is mandated by Visa and MasterCard and is industry wide; therefore affecting every processor in the industry and their merchant alike.
In a nutshell, PCI Compliance requires merchants to:
- Use secure applications to protect your credit card data; if you are using the Trinity System from PayJunction, you are half way there.
- Fill out a simple questionnaire that asks simple yes/no questions to ensure any credit cards that you are processing are being protected. This questionnaire takes about 15 minutes. Most merchants will need to fill out the Self Assessment Questionnaire “C” (SAQ-C)
- Finally, possible network scans. If you are processing credit cards through a website, you will most likely need to “scan” your website and office network much like you would use a virus scanner to scan your computer. You can use any PCI network scanner available on the internet i.e. Google “PCI Vulnerability Scan” or you can opt to use the network scanner provided by your merchant acquiring bank.
The PayJunction Support site has a support article on this matter better explaining the entire process.
