POS Security - How To Protect Your Customer Purchases

Protect Your Customers and Your Company with POS Security - Point of Sale Made Safe Point of sale technology can play a part in many aspects of a business’s overall success. Customer satisfaction, operational costs, and complexity of internal procedures are all affected by your POS technology. However, in order to gain any potential benefit that lies within your POS, you need to ensure that your security standards are as high as possible. The risk of the alternative could put your business or your customers at a risk you should not be willing to tolerate. In this post learn how to protect your customers POS purchases and keep their credit card information secure. Education in Tokenization Tokenization is a technology that has long been used in EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) chip cards throughout the rest of the world, but the technology is just now making inroads in the U.S. It provides a much higher level of security for a customer’s information than a traditional swipe card, by replacing the account number and identifying information with a meaningless jumble of characters (the token). The key to this is that the banks that authorize the payment can make sense of these tokens, but people with less honest motives cannot. Even if a token was obtained by someone looking to steal from a customer, they would not have the ability to translate the token into any information that would allow them to access customer assets. Train your employees in what chip cards are and why they are becoming the standard across the world. Then, have them in turn encourage your customers to start using this alternative form of payment. For many, swiping a card is second nature, but cards are much more secure when using the chip feature. Most customers will appreciate the extra information, as many may not know why this new feature is included in their card. PCI Compliance is Vital People in the business of stealing financial data from payment transactions are always finding new and inventive ways to steal your customer’s data. The PCI Security Standards Council is a global body that words to put best practices in place to ensure that these thieves have very little luck in their efforts to rob your customers. PCI Compliance is a standard that is constantly shifting to reflect the best modes of protection available at any given time. The best payment processors always remain PCI compliant, and you should restrict your business to those organizations. Despite the importance of the type of security recommended by the PCI Security Standards Council, the cost and effort of maintaining those standards causes a large number of processors in the industry to fall short of the mark, which is something you should be vigilant against. Use The Latest Available Hardware Currently, this means that you must have hardware capable of processing EMV chip cards at your POS station. Because of the increased level of security these cards offer to consumers, businesses are now liable if they do not use the EMV hardware and data is stolen via their POS. Although EMV is the latest advancement in card technology in the country, you should always attempt to stay current in this regard. The technology evolves in order to combat the best efforts of those who would steal from consumers, and you can improve customer confidence in your organization by always investing in the latest hardware to keep their data, and their money, safe. Related: POS Systems For Business Credit Card Processors Credit Card Machines