Major Credit Companies Unite in the Interest of Security

Five major credit companies have announced the creation of an organisation to develop and maintain security standards for credit and debit payments.

by William White

American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB, MasterCard Worldwide have teamed up to form the Payment Card International (PCI) Security Standards Council.

The Council will manage the PCI Data Security Standard which was established in January 2005 with intention to make card transactions more efficient for all parties involved.

The competing companies say, they have come together to ensure better security that will benefit everyone.

Vice President Network Services for Discover Rod Tourt said “first of all it’s to protect the information of our mutual customers and to make the process of data security compliance easier”.

According to Brian Buckley Visa’s senior vice president of international risk management, “having a single data security standard is a critical issue for the industry and will simplify the process.” “Our view, is that this is first and foremost an important initiative to get data security in place for payment cards,” he added.

Bruce Ruttherford, MasterCard’s vice president of payments said accepting a common set of rules should lead to broader compliance. “These rules,” he revealed “include instructions on proper data encryption, common technical standards and security audit procedures”.

The new Council has already updated the PCI security standard. The revision instructs the implementation of new standards and clarifies language, previously considered as vague. For instance, terms such as ‘periodically and ‘regularly’ have been changed where appropriate to ‘annually or quarterly. According to the council these changes were influenced by feedback from vendors, merchants and payment processors.