Electronic Payment Exchange (EPX), a Wilmington, Delaware-based payment processor, has launched an end-to-end solution. It endorses and incorporates both tokenization and encryption for securing cardholder data from the card reader through the entire transaction lifecycle.
EPX has claimed that by using encrypted card readers with EPX’s BuyerWall credit card data tokenization technology, merchants can do away with point-of-sale systems and card readers from the scope of PCI compliance and eliminate liability associated with the risk of processing, transmitting, and storing sensitive cardholder data.
Encryption built into hardware and software at the point of sale is expected to provide protection against potential breaches before card numbers enter into the authorization process by immediately encoding credit card numbers upon the card swipe. Tokenization is expected to provide security against data breaches and identity theft after the initial card swipe by replacing account numbers with values that are meaningless to hackers and identity thieves.
Ray Moyer, CEO of EPX, commented: Merchants deserve the best possible solution that incorporates the benefits of both technologies. Rather than creating regulation and expecting merchants to absorb the costs and burdens of securing payment data, we in the payment industry must lead the way in developing and delivering the most secure and cost-effective solutions to facilitate PCI compliance, to protect merchants, and to ultimately enhance consumer confidence.
David Hogan, CIO and senior vice president of retail operations for the National Retail Federation (NRF), said: Protecting consumer’s credit card data against today’s professional hackers is a challenge for all merchants. EPX’s announcement of a solution that offers both end-to-end encryption along with tokenization is going to be well received by the entire retail industry.
David Taylor, founder of PCI Knowledge Base, said: This kind of pragmatic solution seems to give merchants the potential of a lower-cost and more easily implemented alternative to protecting cardholder data along every inch of the transaction process. Our research among both large and smaller merchants suggests there is definite demand for solutions that encrypt data at the reader, then tokenize it through the rest of the transaction flow, so we expect this will generate a lot of interest in the market.”
