Network rules

While independent sales organizations stringently keep up their compliance with the Payment Card Industry data security standard, they don't always protect non-payments data and paper records as diligently.

Notwithstanding recent media criticism, there is little doubt that these products offer a better alternative for unbanked and underbanked consumers who would otherwise use a cash-based system to manage their finances.

Three weeks after completing a mobile payment development agreement with China Mobile, the China UnionPay card brand has signed on eight banks to launch a contactless mobile payment system in Shanghai.

Banks and payment card providers would face caps on the transaction fees they can demand from retailers under European Union plans to rein in charges that have been attacked by regulators as anticompetitive.

For the past two weeks, Visa, MasterCard and Discover have been meeting with each other and with regional debit networks to hammer out the business agreements necessary to route debit transactions on EMV-chip cards in the U.S.

CloudPassage, a cloud infrastructure security provider, is offering to address Payment Card Industry security standard compliance for cloud-based businesses.

Manufacturers of PIN entry devices have received updated Payment Card Industry security requirements.

The timing couldn’t be better for the new advisory board of the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council to include several European voices.

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council has published its latest data security guidance for merchants accepting payments with smartphones or tablets.

The PCI Council’s directions for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards are expanding as mobile commerce grows and when combined with local differences in diverse markets, the new guidance statements can be a compliance challenge for issuers that operate in multiple nations. The use of “compliance-as-a-service,” or CaaS, to provide managed monitoring and compliance updates to keep up with changes is an emerging option for large card issuers.

Merchants shouldn't have their heads in the clouds when it comes to data security — especially when they rely on cloud computing to handle payment card data.

The council announced Jan. 31 its guidelines for e-commerce data safety. The information is a result of research completed by the council's e-commerce security special interest group.

Acquirers consider the Payment Card Industry data security standards slightly more important as a source of revenue than as an approach to security, new survey data indicates.

Global Payments Inc. has "essentially completed" its data intrusion remediation efforts and will soon have its response to last year's massive breach of merchant and consumer card data reviewed by the major card networks—the final step before it can return to the networks' list of approved PCI-compliant vendors, according to executives of the Atlanta-based merchant processor.