Credit card and transaction processing companies, as their names suggest, deal with sensitive information about credit cardholders every day. As a result, they have to follow strict rules about data security compliance. 

The most important of these is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which has been adopted by financial institutions all over the world as a general standard to help protect payment systems from breaches, fraud, and the theft of cardholder data.

Data compliance requirements

PCI DSS is an international proprietary information security standard made by the PCI Security Standards Council for organisations that handle cardholder information for American Express, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, and Visa, which are the world’s biggest card schemes. 

All businesses that want to take credit card payments in person, over the phone, or online must be PCI DSS compliant. If an organisation doesn’t meet the requirements of PCI DSS, they could be fined up to $100,000 per month and have to pay more in transaction fees. 

They can also lose their relationship with their bank for good and end up on the Merchant Alert to Control High-Risk (MATCH) list, which means they would never be able to accept card payments again.

As a result, credit card and transaction processing companies must follow PCI DSS, but it is not the only standard they must follow. They also collect a lot of personally identifiable information (PII), such as names, addresses, and phone numbers, which is protected by laws like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

So, data security isn’t just a side issue for credit card and transaction processing companies; it’s an important part of how they do business. IBM and the Ponemon Institute’s 2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report says that credit card and transaction processing companies, which are part of the finance sector, have the second-highest data breach costs of any industry, at $5.72 million per data breach. 

The biggest cost factor is lost business. So, how can companies that process credit cards and other transactions better protect their data and avoid these kinds of losses? Let’s look at it more closely.

Deal with internal threats 

Cybersecurity is often seen as the need to keep outside threats from getting into company networks. But while keeping data and systems safe from cyberattacks is a big part of cybersecurity, credit card and transaction processing companies shouldn’t forget that employees are the second biggest cause of data breaches. Insiders are one of the biggest causes of data leaks, whether by accident or on purpose.

Solutions such as credit card issuing platforms can be used by companies that handle credit cards and transactions to protect data from internal threats without hurting employee productivity. DLP solutions find, monitor, and control sensitive data by using predefined profiles for data protected by laws and standards like PCI DSS and GDPR, but they also let you make your own definitions.

Using contextual scanning and content inspection, they can find cardholder information, PII, and other sensitive data in hundreds of file types, monitor it, and block or limit its transfer. DLP solutions like Endpoint Protector that have a high level of granularity make it possible to apply DLP policies to specific departments, groups, people, or computers based on how much access they have to sensitive information.

Limit access to sensitive information

Companies that need to follow PCI DSS must only let people who need to know access to sensitive data. This means that only employees who are allowed to should be able to see sensitive information, and even then, they should only do so when they need to.

Credit card and transaction processing companies can make sure this requirement is met by using DLP content discovery scans. Organizations can use DLP tools to search their entire company network for sensitive data stored locally on their employees’ computers and delete or encrypt it if they find it in an unauthorised place.

Block or limit removable devices 

Data can also leave a computer through removable devices. When it comes to companies that handle credit cards and transactions and collect, process, and store a lot of sensitive data, the use of removable devices by employees can be a big security risk.

DLP solutions can be used by companies to block the use of USB and peripheral ports as well as Bluetooth connections or limit their use to devices that have been approved. This way, companies can control how secure devices are that are connected to work computers. They can also easily see which employee used a removable device at what time. So, companies can find any insiders who might be trying to steal data.