How to Combat Consumer Payment Data Theft

First Data, a leading payment technology company, and Verifone, which provides secure payment solutions, announced a partnership Monday to help U.S. merchants reduce exposure to large-scale consumer payment data breaches and expedite merchant acceptance of EMV-enabled credit and debit cards.

Large-scale theft of consumer payment data from merchants’ integrated point-of-sale (POS) systems is among the biggest challenges facing the payments industry.

Another challenge comes from the significant number of merchants’ POS integrators and other payment providers looking to certify new EMV-capable devices in response to the mandated fraud liability shift from bank to merchant in October 2015.

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To address this burden, First Data will now offer Verifone’s Secure Commerce Architecture (SCA) solution to its U.S. merchant clients who use Verifone equipment within an integrated point of sale (IPOS) system.

SCA helps to solve the difficulties of EMV compliance by eliminating the flow of consumer payment data into the IPOS.

“First Data’s support of SCA is a significant step in easing the burden on merchants of data breaches, and the related complexity from EMV acceptance in the U.S.,” said Paul Galant, CEO of Verifone.

Payment data will also now flow through First Data’s TransArmor data protection solution, enabling encrypted delivery directly to First Data from the Verifone payment terminal.