5 Reasons a Retailer Needs StagedPay
Every merchant that accepts credit card payments runs the risk of embarrassing and costly data breaches, as well as the high cost of being PCI compliant. While some industries, such as retail, hospitality, and food service, are particularly vulnerable to payment system breaches, every business that processes and stores its customers’ payment information is at risk.
Fortunately, the StagedPay solution offers merchants an innovative way to take credit card payments that keeps your customers’ sensitive data safe and minimizes the impact of a data breach. Keep reading to learn about five reasons why StagedPay could be essential to your business’ well-being and success.
1. Hackers Are Constantly Searching for Payment System Vulnerabilities
Hackers and other malicious actors love point-of-sale (POS) systems. According to the 2018 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, POS devices and servers suffer breaches more than any other piece of hardware.
The scope of some of these breaches is astounding. In 2013, a POS attack on Target resulted in the loss of 40 million customer credit card numbers. And in 2014, hackers acquired credit card data from 56 million customers in an attack on Home Depot.
While many businesses have improved their POS security with encryption and other solutions, sophisticated hackers can still identify vulnerabilities and exploit them.
2. A Data Breach Could Cost Your Business Millions
According to the most recent data, the average data breach costs a business $3.86 million. If the breach is very large and involves a million or more records, the typical cost skyrockets to $40 million.
Besides the immediate monetary impact, a significant data breach can devastate your business’ reputation and destroy your customers’ trust levels. Recent research shows that companies lose an average of 3.6% of their customers immediately after a data breach.
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3. StagedPay Reduces Your Risk of a Data Breach With Tokenized Payments and a Multi-Step Payment Process
A payment system that manages transactions in a multi-step approach with tokenized payments practically eliminates the risk of a catastrophic data breach. Instead of receiving your customers’ full credit card number during a transaction, you only receive a partial number with StagedPay. Then, you and your customers use StagedPay’s secure cloud-based system to finalize payment.
The process works like this:
- During checkout, you get the last few numbers from the customer’s credit card.
- After checkout, StagedPay contacts your customer electronically or by phone and obtains the remaining numbers.
- The customer’s base credit card information (name, address, and first four/last four numbers) are stored in StagedPay’s highly secure digital vault if a card holder wants to re-use a specific credit card in future payments
- You provide your partial number to StagedPay in exchange for a payment token. StagedPay takes your partial numbers and combines them with the remaining numbers to process the payment.
Because your business never has the customer’s full credit card number, you’re not at risk of losing it even if a data breach occurs. And StagedPay also offers an invoicing tool that allows repeat customers to
safely store their payment data in the StagedPay vault for future transactions.
4. StagedPay Is Cost-Effective and Easy to Implement
StagedPay can save you money even if your business never deals with a data breach. Eliminating your business’ access to customer credit card numbers streamlines your Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance needs, which frees up your IT and data security teams’ time so they can address other issues.
Not only that, but because the platform limits your risk, StagedPay may be able to reduce your overall cost per transaction for credit card processing. Many major credit card processors have already integrated with StagedPay.
Finally, with help from Stratus Innovations Group, your business can implement the StagedPay platform in as little as two to four hours. Because the system is hosted on the Azure cloud, you don’t need to purchase and maintain additional hardware to operate StagedPay.
5. StagedPay Supplements Your Existing Disaster Recovery Plan
At Status Innovations, we believe that every business should have a comprehensive IT disaster recovery plan. Since StagedPay is completely hosted in the Microsoft Azure platform, you don’t run the risk of having an IT outage that precludes your organization from selling goods and services. Finally, the elastic scale of the Azure public cloud “Platform as a Service” model provides you the ability to easily scale up during your busy season (which is typically the Christmas holiday season for merchants) .
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Stratus Innovations Group: Protecting Your Business’ Data with Secure Cloud Solutions
Stratus Innovations Group helps business implement cloud solutions that protect their sensitive data. Whether you’re looking for a tokenized payment system like StagedPay, DRaaS, or a virtual datacenter solution that implements identity management and other tools, Stratus Innovations Group can help. To learn more, fill out our quick and easy online contact form or call us at 844-561-6721.
References
Ponemon Institute. (2018, July). 2018 cost of a data breach study: Global overview. Author: Traverse City, MI. Retrieved from https://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/55/en/55017055usen/2018-global-codb-report_06271811_55017055USEN.pdf
Verizon. (2018, February 27). 2018 data breach investigations report. Author: New York City, NY. Retrieved from https://www.verizonenterprise.com/resources/reports/rp_DBIR_2018_Report_en_xg.pdf
The content provided here is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice on any subject.