College campuses are known as places where diverse cultures meet and a melting pot of information and experiences are shared. Included in this melting pot of diversity are the different credit cards that thousands of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and guests use every day.  Protecting the sensitive financial information of credit card users on campus is an essential aspect of campus security and failure to detect a cyber financial threat could yield harsh consequences for the less cautious of schools. Choosing a different solution for each payment type can appear to be a daunting task due to the wide variety of payment options on campus.  However, if an integrated and ubiquitous payment system like the FreedomPay Commerce Platform were integrated onto your campus, campus payment security could be centralized and more focused. 

Vanderbilt University is a perfect example of how implementing an advanced secure commerce platform with EMV, NFC, and PCI-validated P2PE can promise top-tier protection,cut financial fraud, and reduce the scope for PCI DSS compliance. By installing validated P2PE(Point-to-Point Encryption) payment terminals across campus, Vanderbilt is investing in thefuture of their security, allowing students, staff, and guests to pay securely without compromising their financial integrity. They state, “The solution was well planned by FreedomPay and tested in advance.  We did a self-install with remote support from FreedomPay.  When we encountered a challenge during the implementation, FreedomPay worked with CBORD and pushed out an update to resolve the issue.” 

It’s hard to overstate the importance of PCI-validated P2PE systems. The PCI Council urges the deployment of validated P2PE solutions if high-level payment security is a priority. P2PE is essential because it encrypts card data, leaving its content useless to would-be hackers,while it travels from the merchant’s system through the transaction cycle (King, March 2016). Another point to be considered is the importance of deploying payment devices with NFC support for the mobile wallets that more students are becoming familiar with. Deloitte predicts that “… the volume of NFC-smartphone transactions and the range of spend value to increase steadily over time as consumers become more familiar with the process, and more banks and merchants in more markets accept this form of transaction” (Deloitte, 2015). With an increase in usage of mobile wallets, millions of more instances of cyber fraud will occur and security will be more important than ever. Because of this looming financial threat, creditors are pressuring banks to enforce penalties on colleges that don’t comply with certain security standards (Mills-Senn, 2015).  

With the threat of penalties and the potential disaster of cyber fraud, campuses have never needed to focus on credit card security more than they do now. Most campuses payment systems and “security” designs are outdated and susceptible to hackers. The intelligent admin understands that investing in their campus’s future can only be achieved if their students’ future is secure. By investing in a ubiquitous and centralized payment security system with FreedomPay, credit card breaches will be the last thing you worry about as an admin.