High-Risk Payment Processing: PCI Compliance Essentials 2025

Did you know that failing to achieve PCI compliance can not only lead to costly fines but also erode customer trust? In this episode, we break down PCI compliance in simple, empowering terms. Discover what PCI compliance is, why it matters, and how you can protect your business from unnecessary fees, data breaches, and reputational damage.

In this episode, these questions and topics will be covered:
• 00:46 - Understanding PCI compliance and its critical role in safeguarding your business.
• 02:15 - The true cost of non-compliance and how monthly fees, hefty fines, and data breaches can impact your bottom line.
• 04:00 - A step-by-step guide to evaluating your security measures and meeting PCI standards.
• 06:00 - Implementing secure payment processors, encryption, strong passwords, and two-factor authentication.
• 08:30 - Leveraging PCI compliance vendors to simplify the process and overcome hurdles.
• 10:00 - Protecting your business reputation, enhancing customer trust, and ensuring smooth payment processing.

If you found this episode helpful, please leave a rating or review on your preferred listening platform and share it with other business owners! Tune into the podcast and take charge of your payment security.

Mentioned:
PCI DSS Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ)
PayDiverse PCI Compliance Support

Have a question about something in the episode? Send your questions to Info@PayDiverse.com and check out our FAQ page https://paydiverse.com/faq

Connect with PayDiverse:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paydiverse
Website: http://www.paydiverse.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/franksena

Transcript

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Hey, welcome to The Payments Guy, your ultimate guide to demystifying the confusing world of merchant payments. I'm Frank Senna, your host, a merchant payment specialist with nearly a decade of experience. In each episode, we'll break down the toughest challenges in the payment space so you can be better informed when navigating payments for your own business. From minimizing the impact of chargebacks, avoiding funding issues, and ensuring you're never stuck without the ability to process payments, we'll help you make smarter decisions and grow your business. Let's get started. Imagine losing the ability to process payments overnight due to a compliance issue that you didn't even know existed, or suffering a data breach that costs you thousands of dollars and destroys your customers' trust in you. Today, we're breaking down PCI compliance in simple terms, what it is, why it matters, and how you can protect your business while avoiding costly mistakes. Welcome to the Payments Guy podcast. I'm Frank Senna, and I help e-commerce merchants navigate the complex world of payment processing. Today's episode is about PCI compliance, what it is, why it's critical, and how to ensure your business is covered. So this is really important because many merchants don't even realize that they're being charged a monthly non-compliance fee on their merchant account each month, or that they're at risk of serious penalties if their business is not PCI compliant. So by the end of this episode, you will know the real consequences of non-compliance, how to become compliance with minimal hassle, and how to avoid common mistakes that could cost your business money and cost you your reputation with your customers. Okay, so let's talk about this. What exactly is PCI compliance? PCI DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and it's a set of security that are there to protect credit card transactions and the data around those transactions. PCI compliance applies to all businesses that process, store, or transmit card data. So whether you take payments online, in the store, or over the phone, you must be compliant. And keep in mind, this is not a one-time certification. It's an ongoing requirement that is required to protect sensitive data. So why is this important? Well, first of all, merchants who are not compliant can incur fees from your processor each month, and that can range from$25 to$50 a month. A lot of merchants don't even realize that they are being charged this fee. An easy way to check and see if you're being charged a noncompliance fee is look at your monthly statement from your payment processor. And in the fee section towards the bottom, you're going to see a line item that says something like PCI noncompliance. compliance. It's usually 25 to 50 bucks, but it's completely avoidable and it can save you a couple hundred bucks a year. So it's important that you pay attention for your own bottom line and then also for the reasons we're going to cover with ensuring that your reputation is intact with your customers and that they trust you. So in addition to incurring this fee from your merchant processor for being non-compliant, you can actually be charged huge fees by the card brands like Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and Discover, which can range from$5,000 to$100,000 a month, depending on the size of your business and the severity of a data breach. If a data breach occurs while you're non-compliant, these penalties can escalate to half a million dollars per incident. You also could be liable for fraud losses from exposed cardholder data. So it is so important that you take this seriously and you ensure that your business is PCI compliant and that you are handling the sensitive payment data in a compliant way that is going to keep you off the hook if the worst thing happens. So noncompliance can increase your risk of a cyber attack on your website or a data breach. This is hackers who are sending those phishing scams and trying to get access to your systems because they want to get access to cardholder data. If they can get credit card numbers, the security codes, the names, the addresses, any of that information, then they can now run a ton of transactions on these stolen credit cards and you're going to be responsible for that. So a breach could lead to fraudulent transactions, lawsuits, and even getting your account terminated by your payment processor. So So you really want to avoid being non-compliant. Another effect of being non-compliant or another repercussion is that if your business is persistently non-compliant, your acquiring bank could increase your fees or they could just pull the rug out from under you and terminate your merchant account, which leaves you unable to collect credit card payments. And that could cripple a merchant's business. So there's some great benefits to being compliant, which includes avoiding unnecessary costs and fines from fraud-related expenses. You don't want anything to do with that. Also, you're protecting your customer data, which is a great thing, and it helps your customers continue to trust you and doesn't break that trust. And it ensures that your ability to process payments is unencumbered and you are able to collect credit card payments without the banks suddenly pulling the rug out from under you because your business is non-compliant. So how does a merchant become PCI compliant? There's actually a questionnaire. It's like an online quiz called the Self Assessment Questionnaire. You may have heard of this. It's usually the acronym SAQ, Self Assessment Questionnaire. Basically, it is an online form that you have to fill out. It's kind of tedious, and it evaluates how you process payments and then determines which security requirements will apply to your business. So the type of the self-assessment questionnaire that you need to complete will depend on whether you collect payments online through your website, in-store, via physical card, or over the phone. Businesses who store or transmit card data may need a quarterly scan by an approved scanning vendor. Like I said at the ongoing requirement that you remain compliant. As technology is changing compliant and as hackers are getting smarter and fraudsters, it's more important that you're constantly checking and making sure that your website is compliant and able to defend against attacks and fraudulent activity. So there's a couple of security best practices that you are going to want to follow for your business. So always use a secure payment processor that encrypts data, any merchant accounts that you get through my company, Paydiverse, will always be secure and encrypt their data. Another kind of common sense thing that we might not always think of is you want to limit who has access to cardholder data. So if your employees who maybe are just helping out or doing administrative stuff, you want to make sure they don't necessarily have access to your customer's sensitive payments data unless they they need it for their job. So think about who on your team needs access to this data and then take actions to limit it to just the people who need to know. Another really important best practice is making sure you have strong passwords and two factor authentication. This is going to help defend your business from fraudsters and hackers who are trying to access that really sensitive data that you might be keeping in a spreadsheet or in a Dropbox or something like that. So it's really important that you have a strong password that could not be easily guessed and that you have two factor authentication enabled on all of your apps. I absolutely recommend using a password manager. I know Apple has one that is built in. There's also one that I use called LastPass that is really helpful. It's free and it allows you to make sure all your passwords are secure and there's no repeats because Because if you use the same password for a bunch of stuff, then if that password gets identified, then now someone has access to all of your accounts or all the accounts that share that password. So really important you keep those passwords unique. You also want to make sure that you keep software on all your technology updated. This includes your payment terminals, but also even your computer and even your phone and then any firewalls that you have as well. These will protect against attacks. You never, ever want to store full cardholder details in your own personal system or your own business system unless it's absolutely necessary. You just don't need that risk. So if you have a way of ensuring that you can delete that cardholder data after it's collected, do it. If you are running a business that has maybe a subscription, there are tools available to keep that cardholder data securely so that the risk of it getting jeopardized is minimal. The good news is if you have a merchant account through my company, PayDiverse, whichever bank that we connect you with and get you approved with is going to have a third party PCI compliance vendor who will, their whole point is to help you complete that self-assessment questionnaire successfully. So you're going to have support in completing this questionnaire and we'll talk about some of the challenges that that come along with being PCI compliant in this next part. So one challenge is merchants are completely unaware of their compliance status. Like I said, you can check your merchant processing statement for a monthly non compliance fee. If you're being charged a non compliance fee, it means that you are not PCI compliant or that your bank is just not aware that you've completed that PCI compliance. Once you complete the self assessment questionnaire, you will receive a certificate that says this merchant is compliant as of this date. You share it with your processor and then they will make a note internally and they'll stop charging you that noncompliance fee. And if they were charging the noncompliance fee by accident, maybe you are compliant a few months earlier and they didn't realize you can ask them to refund you that fee and they'll give you some money back. So the next challenge is that this self assessment questionnaire is a little bit confusing. It can be technical at some times. So like I mentioned, You can work with a PCI compliance vendor and they're going to help you answer any questions that you have to complete successfully complete that self assessment questionnaire. And again, all of my merchants will automatically get access to a third party vendor to help them at no cost to them. Another challenge is that some merchants just avoid dealing with this because it's technical and they're like, I don't really know what this means or how to handle it and I'll just Just pretend it's not there. All the reasons that we discussed, it's not a good idea to avoid becoming PCI compliant. A lot of the changes or requirements for being compliant are actually simple policy changes. They're not necessarily like something you need a developer for. So, for example, it could be just like training employees on a new process for handling that sensitive data in a secure way. It could be updating your passwords or just ensuring that only the people who need access to that sensitive data have it. You might need the assistance of a web developer to help implement some of the best practices on your site, but chances are you can become compliant without needing to depend on a web developer. So to wrap this up, PCI compliance is really important because it protects your business from costly fines, fraud, and account termination. Plus, it helps your customers maintain trust in your business. Fines for noncompliance can range from$5,000 to$100,000 a month. And if there's a data breach, you could be charged half a million dollars per incident. Merchants who are accepting payments online, in-store, or over the phone, you all need to comply. It doesn't matter how you're collecting payments. Everybody needs to be PCI compliant if they are collecting payments. Achieving compliance is simple than you think. And PayDiverse partners with ISOs that offer PCI compliance vendors to help. So you can get this PCI compliance done very easily with any one of our providers. Check your processing statement to see if you're being charged a non-compliance fee. And if you are, it's time to fix it. If you need help with PCI compliance, we've got you covered. If you process payments with PayDiverse, we'll connect you with the right PCI compliance support to Make it easy. Visit paydiverse.com or email support at paydiverse.com to set up a free PCI compliance consultation today.