PCI COMPLIANCE IS NOW MANDATORY FOR ALL RESTAURANTS THAT ACCEPT CREDIT CARDS
It is critical that you take a few short steps immediately to validate PCI Compliance for your Restaurant.
Since 2005, more than 234 million credit/debit card records have been compromised. The major card companies Visa, MasterCard, Discover, AMEX and JCB have created an organization to help prevent future breaches – the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Council, www.pcisecuritystandards.org.
Protecting your customers’ cardholder information is critical to us. To achieve protection, every merchant in the US that accepts payment by credit/debit card, regardless of merchant size or transaction volume, must now meet the standards established by PCI Council.
Merchants that are not compliant face financial and operational penalties if cardholder information is lost or stolen at their business. Of course, it is also important to remember, that losing your customers’ cardholder information could cost you those customers and any potential customers that hear about the breach. PCI Compliance is an ongoing, multi-step process that you need to begin NOW in order to validate your compliance prior to the July 1, 2010 deadline. There are two ways for you to validate that you are “PCI Compliant”:
1. You are encouraged to use our partner, Panoptic Security, to help you with the PCI Compliance process. This will be your quickest and best option to ensure that you are compliant in time for the July 1, 2010 deadline. We’ve worked with Panoptic Security to streamline the validation process and minimize the amount of work involved. All you need to do to get started is to click on the PCI Compliance button.
Your User Name is your Merchant ID as printed on your merchant statement. If you have more than one Merchant ID you will receive one letter for each ID as each Merchant ID must have its own certification.
ONESOLUTION CUSTOMER PCI PORTAL:
User Name: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx – Please call OneSolution and we give you your user name. Please call us at (480) 282-8482. Ask for Bernard. He will also give you your Password: xxxx. Here is your login for the PCI Portal, that we have made available for you:
http://www.panopticsecurity.com/OneSolution/
As soon as you log into the Panoptic Security ExpertPCI Wizard you will begin the step-by-step process to complete the mandatory Self-Assessment Questionnaire. Through our partnership with Panoptic Security we have been able to pre-fill many of the questions for you so you will just need to verify the information for accuracy. Panoptic Security provides plenty of on-screen support as well as online chat support and telephone support so you can finish the compliance process as efficiently as possible. The cost to complete the online questionnaire is $79.--. As your business processes transactions over the internet you will be required to have quarterly scans for an additional annual fee of $49--. You will be instructed if you need this scan when you complete the questionnaire.
2. Your alternate option is to manually complete the paperwork required to document your compliance. This is not recommended because of the tremendous amount of work required to select and complete the appropriate questionnaire. If you decide to pursue this method you may go to https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/pdfs/pci_ssc_quick_guide.pdf for more information. Please keep in mind that the PCI Security Standards Council does not provide merchant support in the event that you have questions. You are required to provide proof of validation upon completion.
PCI Compliance is an ongoing process. You will need to complete/edit the Self Assessment Questionnaire annually (or when you make changes to your acceptance environment i.e. you set up an e-commerce site, change POS system, etc.).
We strongly encourage you to begin the questionnaire today in order to meet the upcoming deadline and avoid non-compliance fines and monthly non-compliance fees which most processors have begun charging (!) as of June 30, 2010.
Please contact us at (480) 282-8482 if you need help logging into the website or if you have any other questions.