Visa®, MasterCard®, American Express®, Discover® and the ATM debit networks mandate all businesses accepting their branded electronic payments must be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (“PCI DSS” or commonly referred to as PCI Compliance). The PCI DSS is a set of rules designed to greatly reduce the chances of a data security compromise involving cardholder information. While the intentions of the PCI DSS requirements are to simply protect cardholder account information, the task of becoming PCI compliant is not always so straight forward. For many small and medium sized businesses it requires hiring outside IT professionals and making considerable investments in data security technology.

What's at stake

Merchants who experience a data security breach are subject to fines and other expenses; many of which we have estimated for you below:

Forensic Investigation: ~$10,000 - $30,000

Potential loss of processing service until issue has been reconciled

Re-Issuance of Compromised Cards: Typically ranging from $10 - $30 per card multiplied by the amount of compromised cards. If 5,000 cards are compromised through a breach, fines can range from $50,000 - $150,000!

Damage to your Business Brand: This may be the most expensive and irreversible issue associated with a data security breach. How would your business be impacted if your customers couldn't trust your organization to keep their payment data and other information safe?

What you can do

First step is to validate PCI compliance. The easiest way to do this is to enroll in a PCI compliance validation program. Click here to learn more about our PCI Compliance Validation Service.

Second step is to remediate any issues found during the validation process. For those businesses who don't have expert IT resources in-house, Payment Logistics can help. Click here to learn more about our PCI Remediation Services.