The challenge for retailers these days is clear: optimizing sales channels while minimizing exposure to risk. Somewhere on that shifting scale, retailers find themselves always looking for the next point-of-sale (POS) upgrade. Each comes with increased costs and increased risks. The costs are in technology upgrades and absorbing the impacts of fraud. The risks are the liabilities assumed with each transaction that data will be stolen for which the merchant will be on the hook. Whether you process payments through ecommerce, inbound call centers or back office orders, data will be exposed.

Tom Smith, vice president of Marketing at FreedomPay, explains the scope of the problem: “There has been a proliferation of mobile point-of-sale systems (mPOS), where a store associate brings the POS to the customer for payment. In each example, customer credit card information is being captured in different physical and virtual locations throughout a retailer’s environment. And each time a customer pays with a credit card, there is a risk of fraud and an opportunity for clear text credit card information to enter a point-of-sale system and/or network environment.”

Protecting against exposure of clear text data is only the first hurdle in the race to outrun fraud. FreedomPay removes that hurdle for retailers.

“The reality is card security is just the beginning of the journey, not the end,” Smith continues. “For overall payment security, we recommend a trinity of best practices to better protect payment card data: EMV, point-to-point encryption (P2PE) and tokenization.”

With these three best practices, each defense safeguards one section of the fraud pipeline. P2PE will safeguard you and your customers at either end of the data pipeline where clear text data is transmitted. EMV (Europay, Master Card and Visa) chip cards are invulnerable to magni-strip data theft and help to identify the card to its owner; tokenization masks customer transaction data sent back to the retailer’s network for future use on returns, exchanges or disputes. These defenses, when combined, give retailers maximum assurance against fraud.

The problem is, only deploying one or two of these payment security solutions doesn’t cover the entire end-to-end pipeline. That’s where FreedomPay comes in. Our solution was the first in North America to offer PCI validated P2PE, EMV and tokenization protection. In addition, the FreedomPay platform provides omni-channel payment security for card-not-present payment methods with our Hosted Payment Page and Virtual Terminal solution. These solutions encrypt the cardholder data and our backend tokenization ensures that cardholder data is not being stored in retailers’ networks.

FreedomPay offers ease-of-transaction and piece of mind for all retailers looking to multiply their avenues of transaction without compromising their reputation or their customers’ data. As an integrated service provider of PCI certified P2PE, EMV and tokenization protection, FreedomPay is your omni-channel payment security platform. FreedomPay’s P2PE solution is integrated with most leading retail POS systems, and provides retailers a broad selection of Ingenico payment devices that can be plugged into mPOS and inbound phone order systems, customer service centers and multi-lane checkouts. Whatever payment security platform you have or want, FreedomPay has your solution. See our solutions in action at this year’s NRF. Schedule a meeting with one of our payment security experts.