These security methods put a considerable amount of technology to work on your behalf to provide reassurance to your customers – and to you. The tech is applied to add additional barriers and keep them in place to deter those crafty criminals out there looking for points of vulnerability to steal personal and financial data.

It’s important to develop some type of Payment securityfor a business.Businesses of the 21st century increasingly find themselves in a post-cash world. The use of credit cards since 2000 has grown by $10 billion of transactions, while the use of debit cards has grown almost tenfold to $50 billion.The increased use of debit and credit cards poses a series of challenges for any business due to the risks of processing a credit card payment online. Credit card payments are still the most common type of payments, but unfortunately with the growing number of online payments, there are also more fraudsters. Data thieves have a huge amount of knowledge on how new technologies work, so they are always looking for the vulnerable points of payment processing.Throw in each provider’s fees, contracts and fine print, and you have a wildly complex decision in front of you. You need to consider a myriad of factors, and how they affect your business. There is no right or wrong answer — only what works best for your unique set of circumstances.

What makes online payments secure?

Figuring out the best way to accept card online and choosing the right payment processor can be overwhelming at the beginning. It is the lifeblood of your ecommerce operation. It’s not easy, and almost impossible, to remove fraud, but there are many ways to secure your data and prevent it from being stolen. Read below to find out what to focus on in order to ensure that payment processing on your website is secure.

EMV Compliance: EMV, also known as a chip card or a smart card, has become the global standard for credit and debit cards that’s based on microchip technology that was developed by MasterCard©, Europay and Visa© to enable acceptance of secure payment transactions. The microchip technology contains better security features than those available for the long-used magnetic stripe credit and debit cards. The chip enables cryptographic processing, helping to keep data safe from identity thieves and those hoping to commit fraudulent transactions with the credit card information they steal. By migrating to acceptance of EMV cards only, you will be able to further protect yourself. While not everyone in the U.S. has EMV cards yet, there is growing acceptance of this new technology as consumers and businesses that use credit cards appreciate the additional security offered.

TLS Encryption: Data security on e-commerce websites or an online payment system begins the moment a user lands on the site. The TLS Certificate tells users that the data transmitted between the web server and their browser is safe. Without TLS Encryption in place, all data sent over the Internet is unencrypted and is visible to anyone with the means and intent to intercept it. An easy way to check if the e-commerce websites you frequent are SSL certified is to look at the URL and see if it uses ‘http://’ or ‘https://’ protocol. The additional ‘s’ signifies a secure e-payment system. You can also look for the padlock icon at the beginning of the URL. Modern web browsers in their race to make the Web secure by default are now following the opposite paradigm – mark HTTP sites as “insecure”.

PCI Standards: The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard was put into place to protect consumers and businesses by creating a certain regulatory framework that provides a universal standard for how to handle, use, and store credit card information. These standards came about in response to the numerous data breaches among large and small retailers and were developed in order to help companies detect, react, and prevent future data breaches. Non-compliance not only leads to large fines from credit card association members like Visa and MasterCard, but it also puts your business in a vulnerable position for greater security threats that you don’t want. The PCI Security Standards Council is a global organization that maintains and promotes compliance rules for managing cardholder data for all e-commerce websites and online payment systems. While it does not guarantee that you won’t have a data breach, PCI compliance does go a long way toward helping to deter fraudsters.The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) is in effect a set of policies that govern how sensitive cardholder information should be handled.Keep infrastructure secure: This directive involves keeping abreast of new PCI-DSS mandates and using updated software and spyware to protect against known software vulnerabilities, running regular system and software scans to ensure maximum data protection.Restrict information access: An important part of securing online payments on e-commerce websites is restricting access to confidential information so that only authorized personnel will have access to cardholder data. Cardholder data must be protected at all times – both electronically and physically.

Tokenization: This security measure provides a way to not have to collect or store any sensitive information on your operating system.Tokenization is a process by which a 16-digit card number gets replaced by a digital identifier known as a ‘token’. This is done to ensure the safety of the original data while allowing payment gateways to securely access the cardholder data and initiate a secure payment.Tokenization takes the sensitive data and replaces it with a randomly generated string of characters that can then be linked back to the original data only by an authorized party. Not only does this work well with PCI compliance, which states that you should not store any data on your system, but it also makes you less vulnerable to criminals that want to get that information.

Fraud Prevention: Apart from these mandatory protocols, most e-commerce websites and payment gateways have their own fraud and risk prevention systems.