Ingenico S.A. and Merchant Link, a Silver Spring, Md.-based provider of payment gateway and data-security services, announced Jan. 10 an agreement to jointly offer On Guard with Merchant Link’s TransactionVault tokenization technology.
The companies plan to market their joint service, dubbed On Guard with TransactionVault, primarily to integrated multilane merchants interested in reducing their business risks and liabilities associated with potential data breaches by eliminating the transmission and storage of plain-text cardholder data from the merchant environments, rendering card data unreadable and unusable to cyber criminals, the companies noted in a news release.
Ingenico unveiled On Guard, its new transaction-encryption and tokenization service, last week.
Developed in-house by the France-based point-of-sale terminal maker, On Guard, like similar services, encrypts transactions at the point of sale and sends the information along to processors using a unique number representing sensitive cardholder data. In doing so, the information is indecipherable without the correct technology to decrypt it, making it less valuable to hackers who might try to intercept the data.
The service is available to merchants of all sizes, Ingenico said in its Jan. 6 announcement.
Ingenico is offering On Guard without per-transaction or licensing fees to independent software vendors and merchants, an Ingenico spokesperson says. These software companies make specialized programs for various industries, such as veterinarians and hair salons and many other types of merchants.
Ingenico says it is making the algorithm necessary for the encryption available for free to members of the Secure POS Vendor Alliance, an Atlanta-based trade group representing the security interests of POS terminal makers.
On Guard works only with Ingenico POS devices and with software that incorporates the technology, the spokesperson says.
Competitors include VeriShield Protect from VeriFone Systems Inc., Hypercom Corp.’s HyperSafe Secure EFTSec Server 2.0, and Heartland Payment Systems Inc.’s E3 products.
These services have a place in the market, says Adil Moussa, an analyst at Boston-based Aite Group LLC.
“The most-devastating breaches are the ones that capture information from large-volume players, such as large stores, processors or banks,” Moussa tells PaymentsSource. “Making sure the data are encrypted will prevent some of those breaches from happening.”
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