For a long time, business transactions relied on face-to-face interactions between vendors and buyers. That's not the case anymore. The last couple of years have been revolutionary for the payments space considering the number of payment solutions available to vendors and customers today. Certainly, the parties providing online payment solutions require some confidential information from both customers and vendors. Such information includes bank account numbers, card numbers, mobile money wallet numbers and much more.
It's your job as a vendor to ensure that you opt for a reliable online payment solution. One way of achieving this is by reviewing the policies implemented by the technology providers. On that note, keep reading this piece to learn about the comprehensive policy requirements for online payment solutions.
Cardholder Data Policies
Just as the name suggests, a cardholder data policy sets out the essential rules to be followed by online payment solutions that interact with a customer's card. Ideally, payment providers adhering to this policy means that they understand the wealth of information contained in a credit or debit card. Essentially, a good online payments provider should tokenise and encrypt valuable cardholder information and state that exclusively in their policies. The information included here is the primary account number (PAN), expiry date and service codes.
Password Policies
Some online payment solutions will require customers to use a password when logging into the payment systems. Therefore, your focus should be to have a policy enforcing strict password rules to protect customer information from hackers. For example, the password policy can require a customer's password to be more than seven characters and contain more than one special character or digits. Additionally, you can back this up with a requirement for customers to change their password after a certain number of days or weeks.
Information Security Policies
Information security policies are guidelines that indicate how businesses use, manage and protect information technology resources. Essentially, choosing a payment solution with robust information security policies guarantees proper handling of your payment details, keeping sensitive information from unwanted access. Look for things like cryptography usage, email protection guidelines and insider threat protection.
Data Classification Policies
The most efficient online payment solutions also rely on data classification policies to safeguard client information. A classification plan categorises stored information based on the sensitivity level. Therefore, the payment solution providers will allocate more resources to safeguard the most sensitive information. Your payments technology provider should provide information classes such as controlled, unclassified information, public and restricted controlled.
For more information, contact a company like Tingg Kenya.