PCI Compliance is the answer, or rather, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Companies who provide payment services such as debit and credit cards – like Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JCB – receive huge amounts of sensitive data from merchants every day which they need to store, process, and transmit securely. In order to achieve this, these financial services created an independent body to regulate and administer security standards ensuring all merchants keep to regulations to overcome credit card fraud.
The standards are defined into 12 steps that cover network security, data protection, program vulnerability, access control, monitoring, and information security policy. The PCI Security Standards Council website contains all the up-to-date payment standards that PCI compliance requires from businesses. Depending on their annual transaction volumes, merchants are categorized into four levels which each have their own set of regulations.