News

New non-profit builds membership to accelerate PCI, cardholder security compliance

August 19, 2009

Last month, five electronic payment companies, including Heartland Payment Systems, announced their active membership in the Secure POS Vendor Alliance, a non-profit organization created by Hypercom, Ingenico S.A. and VeriFone to foster compliance with cardholder security standards. The announcement came nearly one month to the day that federal investigators nabbed the man accused of being behind the Heartland breach, touted as being the biggest card-hacking scheme in history. Antoine van Diem, general manager of technologies and products for Atos Worldline, says SPVA members offer experience with security guidelines, ensure best practice implementation and continue to evolve security enhancements and interoperability required to reduce fraud and lower risk for all participants in card payment transactions:

Membership in the SPVA reinforces our commitment to advancing security within our industry, enables us to gain first-hand knowledge of current security threats and proactively shape future security guidelines.Membership is open to all vendors that develop secure POS payment systems or have products or solutions that interact with secure POS payment devices such as retailers, acquirers and banks.

New members since May 2009 include:

Atos Worldline, the European leader in electronic payments and transactions. The company specializes in end-to-end payment services such as issuing, acquiring, payment solutions and card processing, as well as CRM and eServices like Internet, voice and mobile solutions.
Heartland Payment Systems delivers credit/debit/prepaid card processing, as well payroll, check-management and payments solutions to more than 250,000 business locations nationwide. Heartland is the founding supporter of The Merchant Bill of Rights, a public advocacy initiative that educates merchants about fair credit and debit card processing practices.
Moneris Solutions, one of North America's largest providers of payment solutions, offers credit, debit, wireless and online payment services for merchants and processes more than 3 billion transactions annually.
Radiant Systems Inc. provides POS technology to the hospitality and retail industries. Radiant hardware and software is used in more than 100,000 restaurants, retail stores, stadiums, parks, arenas, cinemas, convenience stores, fuel centers and other customer-service venues.
Witham Laboratories is accredited to perform evaluations and audits against local and global security standards including all PCI.

To learn more about membership opportunities, visitwww.spva.org.