What is PCI Compliance and How Does Stax Protect Your Payments?

In the new, digital era of payment management and shopping, protecting customer data is a top priority. While the news may bring breaking headlines about stolen or lost data from large corporations, every business can take the steps necessary to secure sensitive data.

What is PCI Compliance?

PCI DSS stands for “Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards.” These standards are set by card associations like Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to ensure sensitive payment data is securely processed, transmitted, and stored. The PCI Security Standards Council determines and sets these security standards.

It’s important that merchants comply with PCI standards, as violating them can result in hefty fines. The PCI DSS applies to any business or organization that has anything to do with a cardholder’s data – transmitting, processing, or storing it. So how can your business stay PCI compliant? That’s where Stax comes in.

What Is Pci Compliance

Why Is PCI Compliance So Important?

PCI compliance is essential because it helps prevent data breaches, ultimately cultivating customer trust. When consumers have faith in your business and capabilities to protect their data, they’re more likely to shop with you.

Most small business owners make the mistake of thinking that their business isn’t large enough for PCI compliance to matter to them. But this isn’t the case. Small businesses actually pose the highest risk because they don’t always have the resources to implement tight security measures. As such, they’re typically the ones that are scrutinized the most.

And when that happens, non-compliance can lead to many degrees of harm to any and all business owners.

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What Happens When Your Business Isn’t PCI Compliant?

If your business isn’t PCI compliant, your processor will charge you a monthly fee for not being compliant with PCI DSS standards. It provides no value and only serves as a reminder that your processor has no proof that you’re a PCI-compliant business.

It gets worse: merchants that use a non-PCI certified provider can face class action lawsuits, fines of up to $10,000 per month, and $500,000 per incident. Plus, your ability to process credit card transactions may also be revoked if you are non-compliant.

These results can devastate a business, so it’s crucial to make sure that your provider is not going to jeopardize your business.

How Do You Become PCI Compliant?

At a high level, becoming PCI compliant requires you to:

  • Have a secure network and systems for processing payments
  • Safeguard cardholder data
  • Implement a vulnerability management program
  • Enforce strong control access measures
  • Monitor and test your networks regularly
  • Have an information security policy

It’s important to remember that you shouldn’t just strive to become PCI compliant; you must stay PCI compliant by continuously taking the steps above.

The Right Payments Provider Can Help with PCI Compliance

Adhering to the requirements outlined above may seem like a lot of work—and it can be. But here’s the good news: the right payments processor can help keep your cybersecurity ducks in a row.

Stax is a Level 1 PCI Service Provider. Level 1 is the highest level of PCI compliance, and protecting sensitive data is a top priority at Stax. We offer the resources and insights needed to each one of our members so they can stay PCI compliant, avoiding those fines. We also provide multiple tools to empower small- to mid-sized businesses to maintain their own PCI compliance through self-assessment questionnaires, partnership with Approved Scanning Vendors (ASV), and intuitive compliance portals.

An Approved Scanning Vendor performs scans on systems that a service provider or merchant uses, looking for potential vulnerabilities that could lead to a data breach. This is a very handy service to have because an ASV can effectively analyze your systems, so you don’t have to.

There is a wide variety of ASVs that can help businesses and service providers become and stay PCI compliant, such as RSI Security, which leverages technology like tokenization in its approach. By using an ASV and becoming PCI DSS compliant, merchants can be confident both their data and their customer’s data are secure.

Going Beyond PCI Compliance

Enabling you to become PCI compliant is just one of the ways that Stax helps you be more secure. In addition to this, Stax also takes a number of steps to protect cardholder data.

End-to-End encryption and tokenization

Besides PCI standards, Stax also takes a number of steps to secure cardholder data.

Card information is encrypted on all of our processing devices and never stored after the transaction is completed. Stax’s state-of-the-art cloud architecture is constantly tested for vulnerabilities to ensure the safety and security of that sensitive data. And our end-to-end encryption prevents interception of data by third parties and uses modern tokenization services. This prevents third parties from not only intercepting data but from viewing it as well.

Partner data protection

We take security seriously for all of our partners and their customers. As part of our commitment to our partners, our technology is backed by a team of experts who can assist you in PCI compliance, every step of the way.

Stax is also a payment facilitator, meaning your customers can be onboarded quicker with enhanced security for PCI compliance.

We only use PCI and Federal Information Processing (FIP) approved protocols, including exclusive use of the TLS1.3. This layered approach to security means you can accept and manage payments in one of the industry’s most secure environments.

Fraud prevention

For both customers and merchants, fraud is a common concern. Fraud prevention is an integral part of our extensive security measures for cardholder data. Stax’s proactive technologies monitor and investigate accounts for any possible unauthorized charges.

All of our programs are PCI compliant through our integrations with financial partners, with “Know Your Customer” and Customer Identification Program checks to verify merchants, their businesses, and their funding accounts. Our team works tirelessly to monitor and prevent fraud for all of our merchant members.

GDPR compliance

The GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is a law passed by the European Union to protect customer data. The law went into effect on May 25, 2018, and violation of the GDPR can result in steep penalties. While the GDPR only applies to constituents of the EU, Stax has aligned itself where appropriate as part of our commitment to transparency, data protection, and accuracy.

At Stax, we’re committed to securing sensitive cardholder data. As a Level 1 PCI Service Provider, we take the utmost care in protecting this data. We use a host of security measures to prevent fraud and ensure PCI compliance across all of our products. Our team will always be available to assist you in staying within PCI standards. In the new digital age of payments and shopping, security is top of mind for businesses. With Stax, you can rest easy knowing your data is protected and secure.

Final Words

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of PCI compliance and how it impacts your business. When it comes to the Payment Card Industry, it’s always better to be safe than sorry, especially with the disastrous outcomes that non-compliance can bring. To find out what your merchant level is and how you can become PCI compliant, visit this helpful resource.

At Stax, we’re committed to securing sensitive cardholder data. As a Level 1 PCI Service Provider, we take the utmost care in protecting this data. We use a host of security measures to prevent fraud and ensure PCI compliance across all of our products.
Our team will always be available to assist you in staying within PCI standards. In the new digital age of payments and shopping, security is top of mind for businesses. With Stax, you can rest easy knowing your data is protected and secure.

Get in touch with us to learn more about how Stax keeps your business and customers secure.

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