The State Of PCI And The VAR, ISV & Retailer Ecosystem

By Mike Monocello

Point of sale technology has been evolving at a very rapid pace. At the same time, the payments space has seen an equal amount of change. In both cases, mobility is often at the center of the change and, in both cases, the changes mean that value added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs), who are installing and/or creating solutions for merchants, are forced to keep up.

Integrated Solutions for Retailers (ISR, a retailerfocused magazine) recently conducted a survey of its retail readers on the topic of payment processing. The survey asked retailers — who, as you should know, are mandated by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council to meet certain security standards — a slew of questions about their current payment security situation. Topics and terms like PCI, Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ), Point to Point Encryption (P2PE), and card data breach protection programs were mentioned throughout the survey. At the end of the survey, respondents were asked to identify terms they were unfamiliar with that were mentioned in the survey.

Unbelievably, the survey showed that 10% of retailers were unfamiliar with the term PCI. Other terms and concepts didn’t fare much better. For instance, even out of those retailers who were familiar with the term PCI, 20% said they were not aware that they needed to comply with PCI requirements. How does this translate to an opportunity for VARs and ISVs and what steps should you take to convert this opportunity into sales of new hardware and/or software?

Download this white paper to read more about the state of PCI and the VAR, ISV, and retailer ecosystem.