Merchants’ Common PCI Compliance Myths

A firm may benefit greatly from happy consumers. Companies may concentrate on client pleasure by offering discounts, unique in-store experiences, and a large range of items. One of the most important aspects of client pleasure is the security of their sensitive data.

If someone makes a purchase at your shop and then encounters fraudulent transactions, they are likely to retain a negative view of your store for a long time.

Being PCI compliant is the most effective approach to ensuring that you are doing your share to secure cardholder data. One of the most difficult components of taking merchant payments is becoming approved with PCI standards.

Despite the challenges, PCI compliance might be desirable, particularly when you consider the status of your processing accounts, customer data security, and customer relations. There are many fallacies associated with obtaining PCI certified. This essay seeks to dispel PCI compliance misconceptions and misunderstandings so that you may make the best choice possible.

Myth: Small companies do not need PCI compliance
PCI compliance requires a complex set of requirements to be met. As a consequence, many merchants believe that only firms that handle big amounts of transactions must be PCI compliant.

To secure cardholder data, all businesses that perform transactions using credit cards or equivalents must be PCI compliant. This includes companies that may not even be open all year. In reality, PCI compliance is divided into four tiers to accommodate varying company sizes. The levels are as follows:

This category includes smaller enterprises. This includes processing less than $20,000 in Visa e-commerce transactions or fewer than one million transactions of any sort in a calendar year.

Businesses that conduct Visa e-commerce transactions worth between $20,000 and $1,000,000 per year must maintain level 3 PCI compliance.

This category is for merchants that handle between one and six million dollars per year. These must be Visa e-commerce transactions across all platforms.

This is the highest level of PCI compliance, and it is reserved for firms with substantial transaction volumes. This category includes companies that conduct more than six million dollars in Visa transactions, regardless of kind or channel.

Each level of PCI compliance often gets more hard and expensive to complete. However, the standards for PCI certification from level 2 to level 4 are almost identical. Every year, they must submit a self-assessment form and a certification of compliance.

These companies must have their systems vulnerability scanned by an authorised scan provider every quarter. Because of the transaction volume, there is an extra need for a level one merchant. An internal auditor or a competent security assessor must produce a compliance report four times each year.

Myth: Only e-commerce businesses must be PCI compliant

PCI compliance is advised for every organization that keeps, processes, or transmits cardholder information. In reality, retailers that handle cardholder information via POS terminals are more vulnerable to data breaches than e-commerce companies.

Physical data is considerably easy to compromise if it is not safeguarded. Non-compliant POS machines often keep card data without encrypting it. There may be severe penalties for security breaches as a result of this.

Myth: You are not required to satisfy all PCI standards

PCI compliance is a minimal level of security that retailers may use to secure cardholder data. This implies that anybody who does not meet the minimal requirement is not eligible for PCI compliance.

As a result, for any merchant to be PCI compliant, they must fulfill all of the PCI SSC standards. PCI compliance serves as a basis for merchants to implement even stronger security processes, thereby reducing the requirement for PCI assessments and even lowering compliance expenses. As a result, achieving all of the requirements for critical PCI compliance is required.

Myth: Being PCI compliant is required by federal law

People have a misunderstanding regarding the government’s role in PCI compliance enforcement. In actuality, the major card companies that hold credit and debit cards determine these rules and regulations.

The data security standard was created by the payment card industry, also known as the PCI. This is enforced by banks and merchant service providers. There is no involvement of police enforcement.

Credit card companies have purposefully enabled this fallacy to flourish. There are a few advantages to ignoring such extensive discrepancy.

Merchants are more likely to remain compliant if they feel PCI compliance is mandated by law. Furthermore, when merchants believe the card industry has little influence over the legislation, they are less reluctant to pay non-compliance penalties.

It is somewhat misleading, but just because PCI compliance isn’t mandated by law doesn’t imply it isn’t necessary. PCI compliance is an effective technique to prevent data breaches and fraud. Data breaches may be very expensive for merchants and processors, as well as destructive to client confidence.

Myth: By outsourcing credit card processing, you may escape PCI compliance

Assume merchants do not use payment processors that provide merchant accounts. In such situation, you may also join up with a payment service provider to accept credit card payments. Payment service providers such as clover and square are sometimes less expensive. They may alleviate a merchant’s duties, such as PCI compliance.