How using a secure payments service can protect your company and your customers
Your business runs on payment transactions…but are they secure?
In our digital age, transactions take place on many different platforms: electronic, mobile, online, telephone, in-person, and more. These platforms are emerging with new technologies and features constantly…and new methods of fraud are emerging even more quickly.
Traditional Merchant Services
Traditionally, these platforms were services provided by many different companies who specialized in a specific form of payment method. This meant that transactions passed through multiple payment gateways and processors before reaching your bank. As you can imagine, numerous avenues of data transmission left many exposed vulnerabilities for possible fraudulent interception.
Luckily, it was more common in those days to have a primary method of accepted payment so companies could limit their exposure by limiting their available options.
The Modern Payment Landscape
These days, limiting the payment options available to your customer is not the best strategy. We, as consumers, are accustomed to choice and variety – and that includes how we prefer to pay for things.
For good business and optimal sales, it is highly recommended that you provide your customers with multiple options for making payments. But how do you do so in a secure and economical way?
Secure Payment Solutions
Instead of working with multiple providers for your POS, online payments, and mobile payments, the ideal solution is to work with one secure payments company who provides all of these services in one platform. This not only simplifies your operations and bookkeeping, but keeps payments secure by diminishing the digital pathways of exposure.
A secure payment solution from a company like FirsTech can provide your organization with multiple platforms to accept payment anytime and anywhere, while also keeping your transactions and data safe and secure.
What Does a Secure Payments Company Do?
We keep your transactions secure by managing the entire payments process and fortifying the system with the latest technology in digital security.
The traditional merchant service solution resembled a grid of communication between issuing banks, credit card companies, payment gateways, payment processors and merchant banks for authorizations and data transmission. In contract, a secure payment system is like an underground channel for all that communication to occur faster and with encryption. The result is security and efficiency.
How a Secure Payments Company Fights Fraud for You
The most effective way to fight fraud is to prevent it. Fraudulent activities are often committed directly against the consumer, but through transactions with a merchant. This means that when fraud occurs, consumers can lose trust in your organization – which can be much more costly than the fraud itself.
To prevent fraud from occurring, secure payment companies employ multiple security measures, such as:
PCI Compliance
PCI Compliance is required for any business that wants to process, store, or transmit credit card data – all of which is needed for processing payments. Getting compliance on your own is a long and expensive process with a certificate that needs to be renewed each year. That is why most companies prefer to work with payment providers like FirsTech to maintain PCI compliance and to keep your customers’ credit card data secure.
Data Encryption and Tokenization
Encryption and tokenization each play a role in a secure payment system. Data encryption safeguards data within an encrypted code. To access the data, a key is used to decrypt the data to be used. This is often used for data in transit such as an online or mobile payment sending credentials for authorization.
Tokenization is another security technology to protect data by turning the sensitive information into a token which is later exchanged to retrieve the original data. This technology is ideal for fixed data like credit card numbers or social security numbers which might need to be kept on file or stored, while remaining secure. Since the data only needs to be accessed and not moved to be accessed by another party for authorization, tokenization provides a secure solution.
Secure E-Commerce
With a service like FirsTech, you can offer your customers online payment processing that is directly integrated into your secure payments solution. For further protection online, an SSL certificate is installed into the website which helps encrypt sensitive data that comes through the site so that it remains safe during transit.
3D Secure
For card-not-present transactions which are increasingly more popular, Three Domain Secure helps ensure that transactions are not fraudulent by requiring that three domains are involved to complete the transaction: the merchant receiving the payment, the issuer of the credit or debit card being used, and the technology or platform that processes the transaction.
To ensure that all domains are authenticated, a password, biometric, or encrypted code is usually required. Once this is verified the chance of a fraudulent attempt is decreased and the liability is shifted from the merchant to the issuing bank, resulting in fewer fraudulent charges and chargebacks.
The Benefits of Working With a Secure Payments Company
In addition to getting experts in the field of financial security to keep you and your customers safe from fraud and loss, your business will experience a variety of additional benefits from working with a secure payments company like FirsTech:
Custom Solutions to Fit Your Needs
For decades, we’ve been designing innovative solutions for businesses in various industries and of various sizes.
As a secure payments company, we can combine our menu of services for you to extend to your customers and offer your own combination of: electronic, mobile, telephone, POS, and online payment solutions that can also be branded and seamlessly integrated into your existing platform.
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Simplified Operations and Operational Costs
With one integrated dashboard, you can view all payment methods in one place. This simplifies reporting and accounting while also reducing service costs. As a result, you can offer a full and diverse payment offering with lower operational costs.
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Faster Payments
With a simplified and centralized platform, and securely authorized payment transactions, reconciliation is also faster. This means that your payments are batched and transferred more quickly, and can be seen in your account as soon as the next day.
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Maintained Compliance
As specialists, we remain compliant for all necessary security regulations (PCI, 3D, AVS). You can rest assured that your systems are up to date with the latest compliance with all necessary certifications.
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Specialized in Security
The digital world moves quickly, so it requires a dedicated specialist to be knowledgeable of the latest fraudulent schemes as well as the latest security technologies. Working with a specialist in payment security gives you the confidence that the latest fraud trends will be known and addressed, and your payment systems will be regularly maintained to proactively protect any vulnerabilities.
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Dynamic Service
With an expanding variety of service offerings, we want to grow with you. Whatever the current size of your organization, and to whatever size your organization will grow to be, our dynamic offering has a solution to fit your current and future needs.
Looking for a Secure Payments Company?
FirsTech can help. With decades of experience in designing systems and services to fuel our clients’ success, we have a comprehensive offering of secure payment solutions for your business. Contact us today for more information.