Now Every Transaction is Protected With the PCI Compliance
The creation of Payment Card Industry compliance, better known as PCI compliance aims to protect personal information and to offer security when using payment cards. Because of its importance, there is the need for the whole payment card industry to comply with the standards in case they wish to accept credit cards. Failure to meet the standards may mean fines from banks and credit card companies, or even the loss of the ability to process credit cards.
Merchants are classified in four merchant levels depending on the Visa transaction volume in the span of 12 months. Transaction volume depends on the amount of Visa transactions from the merchant Doing Business As (or the “DBA”). For cases when a merchant corporation has more than a single DBA, the aggravate volume of the transaction stored, transmitted, and processed by the corporate entity must be considered by Visa acquirer to grasps the validation level. Just in case the data is not aggregated, special to those cases when a corporate entity does not process, store, or even transmit cardholder’s data in behalf of different DBAs, the acquirer will have to continue to take for consideration the individual transaction volume of DBA as to determine the validation level.
Below are the 4 PCI Compliance Merchant Levels classified by Visa:
1. Any merchant- apart from the acceptance channel- practices more than 6M visa transactions in a year.
2. Any merchant, no matter what their acceptance channel is, processed about 1M to 6M Visa transactions in a single year.
3. Any merchant that processes about 20, 000 up to 1M Visa e-commerce transaction in one year.
4. Any merchant that processes lesser than 20, 000 Visa e-commerce transaction in a given year, and other merchants despite of the acceptance channel would process about 1M Visa transaction in a year.
The PCI compliance recommends that each time when personal information regarding a cardholder is stored in a computer, the computer should use measures which will protect a network. Those business owners who wish to store the data and other information of cardholders are given the task to protect the data itself. “Protecting” means that not all can access the said information. For businesses that would store credit card numbers, they would normally store them in an encrypted data thus if someone was able to access the database, that person could never decode the information. Furthermore, a part of the PCI compliance would call for limited access to cardholder information by only those people that has the need to use it. Business owners too are given the obligation to assign a particular identification to each person who has access to it.
Basically, there are various other aspects that are governed by the PCI compliance but we can classify all of them as means that will protect customer’s information for a hassle-free and safe transaction.