Businesses of all sizes continue struggling to meet Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security requirements. The PCI standards were established by the major credit cards; American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa to ensure organizations followed standardized practices to protect card holder information. To learn more about the PCI Data Security Standard and how it may affect your business go to: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org.
The PCI guidelines apply to ALL types of interactions between a card holder, merchants and service providers. This includes IVR applications developed pre-PCI, which allows card holders to make payments for products and services over the telephone. Currently all IVR applications taking credit card payment must be PCI compliant or the merchant could face fines and even lose its ability to process credit cards.
Thousands of companies are in the position where they have to re-tool their IVR applications and infrastructure to become PCI compliant; in some instances developing applications from scratch or switch IVR hosting providers, to providers who offer a PCI compliant environment for processing credit card payments.
For the majority of IVR service providers, who in the past few years have had to resort to cut-throat pricing tactics to gain market share or stay in business, PCI ads a new level of complexity to their business model. PCI is not a commodity; there is a significant cost associated with implementing PCI standards, to ensure card holders are protected. For many service providers PCI means that they must overhaul their infrastructure, change network architectures, changes which might not be cost effective, when only a small percentage of clients use IVR to process credit card payments. Because of increased data security concerns, in addition to PCI, each credit card processor has its own unique set of "platform certification" processes, which service providers must navigate to process payments on behalf of a merchant, and connect with the processor.
As a result a new breed of IVR service providers has emerged. IVR service providers who focus on delivering PCI compliant telephone payment applications. With a focus on security and meeting the PCI standards, this new breed of IVR service providers remove the PCI burden from the merchant and shift it to the service provider.
The PCI guidelines apply to ALL types of interactions between a card holder, merchants and service providers. This includes IVR applications developed pre-PCI, which allows card holders to make payments for products and services over the telephone. Currently all IVR applications taking credit card payment must be PCI compliant or the merchant could face fines and even lose its ability to process credit cards.
Thousands of companies are in the position where they have to re-tool their IVR applications and infrastructure to become PCI compliant; in some instances developing applications from scratch or switch IVR hosting providers, to providers who offer a PCI compliant environment for processing credit card payments.
For the majority of IVR service providers, who in the past few years have had to resort to cut-throat pricing tactics to gain market share or stay in business, PCI ads a new level of complexity to their business model. PCI is not a commodity; there is a significant cost associated with implementing PCI standards, to ensure card holders are protected. For many service providers PCI means that they must overhaul their infrastructure, change network architectures, changes which might not be cost effective, when only a small percentage of clients use IVR to process credit card payments. Because of increased data security concerns, in addition to PCI, each credit card processor has its own unique set of "platform certification" processes, which service providers must navigate to process payments on behalf of a merchant, and connect with the processor.
As a result a new breed of IVR service providers has emerged. IVR service providers who focus on delivering PCI compliant telephone payment applications. With a focus on security and meeting the PCI standards, this new breed of IVR service providers remove the PCI burden from the merchant and shift it to the service provider.
About the Author:
Datatel provides Hosted PCI compliant IVR Credit Card Processing Applications as a Service. Learn more about how to achieve call center PCI compliance.
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