For the Small Business Merchant: Credit Card Compliance & PCI DSS

Christine Baird, CEO, Clarus Tech Partners  |  29 April 2019

The global payment ecosystem is growing, becoming more complex and is inherent with cyber risks.

In today’s digital world, merchants in the ecommerce, retail, hospitality, and restaurant industries need to accept payment transactions via credit and debit cards from their customers.  Because of the digitized processing of payment transactions, the credit card industry has been a target of data breaches which has a huge impact on their bottom line.  So the payment card industry developed cyber security standards for all merchants, from large to small businesses, and rolled out the PCI DSS requirements.

WHAT IS PCI DSS?

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. The PCI DSS is administered and managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, an independent organization that was created by the major payment card brands including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JCB.