The five major credit card companies have teamed up in the
interest of better security.
American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB,
MasterCard Worldwide and Visa International announced on Thursday the creation
of an organisation to develop and maintain security standards for credit and
debit card payments. It's the first time the five brands have agreed on a
single, common framework.
The newly formed Payment Card International (PCI) Security
Standards Council will manage the PCI Data Security Standard, first established
in January 2005 with the intention of making its implementation more efficient
for all parties involved in a payment card transaction. That includes
merchants, payment processors, point-of-sale vendors, financial institutions
and more than a billion card holders worldwide.
The companies have come together despite being in
competition with each other because they say ensuring better security will
benefit everyone.
"First of all, it's to protect the information of our
mutual customers and to make the process of data security compliance
easier," said Rob Tourt, vice president of network services for Discover.
Having a single data security standard is a critical issue
for the entire industry and will simplify the process, said Brian Buckley,
Visa's senior vice president of international risk management.
Having the common accepted set of rules should foster broader compliance, said Bruce Rutherford, MasterCard's vice president of payments. Those rules include instructions on proper data encryption, common technical standards and security audit procedures.
The first action of the new council was to update the PCI security standard, which was promised in May. The revision gives instructions for how to implement the new standards and clarifies language that was previously considered vague. For example, terms such as "periodically" and "regularly" were swapped for definite deadlines like "annually" or "quarterly" where appropriate. A statement released by the newly formed council said the revisions were the result of feedback from vendors, merchants and payment processors.
Now here is an interesting question...
If 5 heads think independently the chance of robbing all five at the same time are none...
But if 5 heads think like 1...its easy to get them all...at the same time
How is joining up as a collective, really improving security?
When they propose the same way of tackling security...
if u beat one (system), u beat them all...
a frightening thought and hopefully they do implement this and we watch them shoot themselves in the foot...
never did have any respect for the money counters anyway...not since they started introducing fees for counting money...