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What is PCI Compliance? PCI stands for Payment Card Industry.
So a little background here… the United States used to have more fraud from credit card processing than all the other countries together. So one of the new adoptions was the chip card because the magnetic stripe can be copied easily by thieves and the chip card is encrypted and much more difficult to copy and create fake cards.
The other adoption has been that the industry decided it should police itself and also educate merchants on how to prevent fraud. So now we have PCI Compliance. It is a requirement that every merchant complete a survey annually.
Now the survey is very geeky and it actually takes an army of people to help guide merchantscan benefit you get to get some guidance to complete this PCI annual survey and answer all the geeky questions. It’s 50 or 60 questions sometimes, depending on how you take the card.
There’s different sets of questions for:
- are you using a mobile device
- or do you have an e-commerce site
- or are you using a credit card terminal
The PCI fee is charged on your merchant statement and it can be charged annually or broken down into a monthly fee.
Now there’s another fee relating to PCI besides the annual or monthly collection of the PCI annual fee and that is that if you don’t do the annual survey, then the processor slaps a monthly Non-PCI Compliance Fee onto your account and that fee can range anywhere from $19.95 a month to $129 a month!
Now you may think that this is very unfair and why do I have to pay these extra Non-Compliance fees? It is a pittance compared to a fee for a cyber attack and your system gets breached. If you get breached the fee is $100,000 and upward.
Hi, I’m Gingergaye, President of Electronic Money Company and we guide our merchants through the annual PCI compliance. We can be on the phone with you as you go through the web annual survey or stay on the phone with you if you choose to do it verbally with the PCI Compliance companies.
Our processor sends out email reminders for you to complete your next annual PCI survey. Please watch for the reminders so you don’t get dinged!
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