First Data, a global provider of electronic commerce and payment processing services, and RSA, the security division of EMC, have teamed up to provide a new service called First Data Secure Transaction Management, to enable merchants to secure payment card data and remove it from their environment while allowing access when needed.
Reportedly, the new First Data Secure Transaction Management service, offered exclusively by First Data and powered by the RSA SafeProxy architecture, is designed to reduce the cost and complexity of complying with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
The company has said that The First Data Secure Transaction Management service employs a unique combination of tokenization, encryption and public-key technologies that are designed to provide merchants with the capability to eliminate credit card data from their environments without loss of business functionality or massive rewrites of applications.
This outsourced service is expected to help merchants to reduce the risks associated with the loss of cardholder data, avoid fines, and help prevent the loss of brand equity and trust.
Michael Capellas, chairman and CEO of First Data, said: “”Payment card data protection and PCI compliance are some of the most significant challenges that our merchant customers face today. Addressing these challenges is both complex and costly. The simplicity of integrating encryption with tokenization through the First Data Secure Transaction Management service dramatically redefines how merchants of all kinds manage and protect their customer payment data.”
Art Coviello, executive vice president, EMC and president, RSA, said: “To comply with the PCI DSS and reduce risk, organizations need security controls built into their infrastructure, and not bolted on. Rather than addressing security risks by deploying disparate point controls throughout their infrastructure, First Data Secure Transaction Management provides organizations with a simplified and scalable solution that helps radically reduce management complexity and costs.”
