Payment processing
For the wheels of commerce to run smoothly, the act of paying for a product or service with a credit or debit card must remain easy, efficient and safe. Payment processing is both highly regulated and constantly changing. Today, each purchase launches a complex, automated and highly integrated process involving not just merchants but also banks, acquirers, payment processors and potentially a host of other players. Not so long ago, this community was a relatively small club of organisations operating a largely isolated network, but increasingly that is no longer the case. A host of changes – technologies such as smartphones and digital wallets, shifts in buying habits, demands by individuals to accept card payments and growing interest in peer-to-peer payments – have created a fierce battle within the industry, as organisations fight to maintain their position or disrupt the status quo. No longer a set of isolated payment processes, today’s entire payments ecosystem is just a component of the broader commercial landscape – playing an integral role in fraud management and data privacy as part of a comprehensive IT security framework that must span the Internet, mobile devices, social networks and cloud services.
- Challenges
- Solutions
- Benefits
Payment processing organisations are under pressure to:
- Exploit new secure payment processing technologies to simplify and enhance the user experience. Online transactions have already transformed the payments industry and the potential for contactless cards, mobile payments and smartphones equipped with card readers could all herald the next revolution.
- Accommodate peer-to-peer payments as they expand the market beyond the world of retail. Even in developing countries, the need to exchange funds has already triggered innovation beyond the traditional banking model.
- Accelerate the transition to a cashless society by embracing micropayments for parking meters, vending machines, highway tolls and other purchases that otherwise involve the unnecessary costs and inconvenience of handling cash.
- Keep a firm grip on fraud. As e-commerce has proven, new technologies almost always expose new threats and drive up fraud, including not just misuse of the payments network but also the theft of data that can be exploited elsewhere. For many, coming to grips with card-not-present fraud is the next frontier in payment processing security.
- Align with international initiatives and technologies. The payments network is a global infrastructure and attackers tend to exploit the weakest points. Global anti-fraud initiatives such as EMV and 3D-Secure are established in some markets and are in the process of rolling out in new markets – EMV in the United States, for example.
- Ensure compliance with broad data privacy obligations. The evolution of the suite of PCI standards is only the tip of the iceberg for privacy mandates and data breach disclosure laws, most of which highlight the particular importance of financial and payments related data.
Payment processing: Thales solutions
Thales hardware security modules (HSMs) and related products have been specially designed to meet and exceed industry standards and regulatory requirements for payment processing security – and to keep your systems and internal processes flexible and scalable. Backed by Thales’ extensive expertise and leadership in the payment processing market and enriched by our long-standing partnerships with leading payments processing vendors, these proven products and services will reduce your risk, trim your costs and help future-proof your payments infrastructure.
Dedicated payments portfolio from Thales can satisfy your compliance obligations and create a high assurance yet flexible and easily managed payments infrastructure.
- Manage cryptographic keys and hardware modules effectively and efficiently across your payments infrastructure.
- Implement proven, certified, hardware-based security solutions with a choice of performance options to fit your requirements.
- Accelerate deployments since Thales products integrate out of the box with payment processing software from leading vendors.
- Simplify and in some cases reduce the scope of compliance obligations.
- Take advantage of extensive EMV support and deployment expertise.
- Provide a consistent HSM management framework between payment processing and card and mobile issuance operations.