DRAPER, Utah — SPOT Business Systems has received its Payment Card Industry (PCI) certification after more than a year of enhancing the software to comply with the new standards.
The PCI Security Standards Council is an open, global forum for the ongoing development, enhancement, storage, dissemination and implementation of security standards for account data protection.
Per PCI mandate, credit-card companies must require PCI compliance at the merchant’s location and related point-of-sale (POS) software in order to continue processing credit-card payments. If a drycleaner or other merchant doesn’t meet compliance, the provider of credit-card processing may choose to discontinue the merchant’s service until PCI compliance is met.
“This is a very big deal for both merchants and POS software providers in the drycleaning industry,” says Mark Jones, SPOT's vice president of technology. “There is no law requiring PCI compliance, but payment processors can deny any merchant the right to process credit cards using non-compliant software after the July 2010 deadline.”
“Since non-PCI compliance has such potentially negative impact for our customers and our company, we have taken the PCI mandate very seriously,” adds Ron Preece, SPOT's vice president of operations. “First, our payment processor, Payment Processing Inc. (PPI), is PCI-certified as a payment processor. Second, our SPOT hosted server farm is PCI-certified. Now, SPOT software is PCI-certified.
“PCI compliance was a major effort that required a significant financial investment on our part. It’s an ongoing certification commitment for our SPOT hosting server farm and SPOT software. PCI certification is expensive to maintain, and it’s imperative for our SPOT customers that we remain compliant.”
To ensure PCI compliance, user must upgrade to SPOT V6 for Windows, the company adds. SPOT hosting customers were upgraded automatically last month.
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