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RETAIL OPERATIONS BY MAURAKELLER Keeping up with technology EMBRACING THE EVER- CHANGING PCI INDUSTRY keep retailers on their toes—trying to determine how to future-proof their investments in the equip- ment, software, and fees required within the PCI arena as the regulations continue to change. As Oren Betzaleli, head of marketing and C products at Retalix, explains, with all the inno- vation and change within the payments industry today, delivering a comprehensive payments program is a growing challenge—especially as more focus is on identity theft and credit card fraud prevention. "One specific part of a consumer's identity that is often targeted by thieves is credit card data. It is particularly easy to steal information from a 'magnetic stripe' credit card, which is currently the standard format in the U.S.," says Mike Finley, vice president and chief technology officer with NCR Hosted Solutions. "We would never dream of using a 40-year-old 8-track tape player in our cars or iPods, but we are effectively still using technol- ogy from that era every time we pull out the plastic to make a payment. What's worse—there's no way to automatically validate a consumer's signature at the point of payment, which means signatures can be useful for archival research, but not for stopping fraud as it happens." According to Betzaleli, the dynamic world of electronic payments has evolved way beyond the integrated credit and debit transaction require- ments of the past. "EBT, gift cards and WIC are now the norm," Betzaleli says. "Integration of sig- nature capture devices, advertising on the pin pad, customized and customer-friendly prompts, and Electronic Check Conversion (ECC) are all becom- ing essential business drivers, and thus, widely implemented. Standard POS payment engines that 26 MAY/JUNE 2012 HANGE IS CONSTANTLY AFOOT WITHIN THE electronic payment industry. From regulatory compliance issues to innovative technological advance- ments, these changes consistently simply route transactions to a specific host no lon- ger provide the needed solution." As Finley explains, PCI arose a decade ago as a way to rein-in the massive credit card fraud that had by then begun to take place. "Not content to steal one consumer's data at a time, organized fraud- sters with deep technical expertise were extracting historical transaction records from merchants in order to commit credit card fraud on a massive scale," Finley says. "PCI was created to limit or stop that possibility." As Alicia High, marketing communications manager at Wayne, a GE Energy Business explains, PCI is all about protecting payment card data and preventing the theft of that data. On the hardware side (PCI PTS standard, pin pads, key pads) it has been focused on protecting PIN information for debit transactions. On the POS side (PCI PA-DSS) it has been more broadly focused on protecting data for all forms of elec- tronic payment. "For a retailer it is about risk and liability," High says. "They need to protect the data to protect themselves from being held liable if there is a breach or information is stolen from their locations." In addition to whatever financial penalties or liability there might be, there is the issue of maintaining consumers' trust as well. "No retailer wants to be in the news for having their customer's credit card information stolen," High says. "The PCI standards will not guarantee data security, but they go a long way in helping to improve the situation." According to Michael Tyler, senior director of marketing at VeriFone, electronic payments con- tinue to increasingly replace cash and checks as the preferred choice of consumers. "That also means that electronic payments are more than ever the target of criminals who seek to exploit the weak- est links in the payment environment in order to generate the largest gains for the lowest effort," Tyler says. "So retailers need to be on the alert to a NPN Magazine n www.npnweb.com