Now Introducing CARDS: Coalition Of Associations For Retail Data Security

By Joe Finizio, president and CEO, RSPA

Just over two years ago the PCI Security Standards Council decided to have a meeting with several industry associations. RSPA, NRF, NACS and MAG attended a meeting with PCISSC’s executive board. The discussions clearly showed that the association attendees had similar issues and concerns. After the meeting I spoke with the NRF and NACS attendees, whom I had known from past business dealings, and recommended that we collaborate to address our common issues relating to retail data security. Immediately, several other associations were contacted to participate and our coalition was formed essentially representing the majority of brick and mortar merchants and retail technology providers in the United States. Our goal was to create a collective industry voice to ensure that the interests of merchants and retail technology providers were addressed and protected as PCISSC moved forward with their standards.

We quickly found out that PCISSC was going to focus on creating standards and money making programs built upon those standards to support their organization. At that point, the coalition of associations established three initiatives to address the broader retail data security and fraud issue.