Merchants to Benefit from TNS’ New Encryption Solutions

Transaction Network Services (TNS) has unveiled a new suite of point-to-point encryption solutions to help merchants protect sensitive cardholder data. TNS’ Managed POS Encryption includes support for the VeriShield Protect end-to-end encryption solution from VeriFone and Trustwave’s hardware-agnostic point-to-point encryption.

Point-to-point encryption technology, combined with tokenization, has garnered a lot of attention in recent months in the wake of a number of high profile data breach cases. To help combat these attacks and protect merchants against this danger, TNS’ diverse portfolio has been designed to allow customers to eliminate the transmission of ‘clear’ cardholder data from the merchant environment.

Offering support for a range of popular VeriFone terminals as well as the device neutral option with Trustwave, TNS’ solutions protect data from the point-of-sale terminal through to the payment acquirer or processor. Merchants can benefit from limited up-front capital expense and can also eliminate the need to commit to any ongoing personnel, management or maintenance resources.

Lisa Shipley, Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Payment Network Solutions at TNS, said: “We are delighted to be extending our suite of point-to-point encryption solutions which will help more merchants protect their customers’ sensitive cardholder data against increasingly sophisticated efforts by hackers to steal this data. Hackers have recognized that targeting individuals is time consuming with small rewards, but businesses offer significantly larger opportunities and as a result we expect attempted data breaches to continue to happen.”

For both solutions TNS uses multiple high-capacity decryption gateways located within geographically diverse data centers, supported by dynamic alternate routing capabilities, to process transactions securely and efficiently. TNS is offering merchants the opportunity to diversify their risk by using a third party provider for encryption services, while at the same time giving acquirers the opportunity to provide this capacity to their customer base.

Ms Shipley added: “We are giving merchants the opportunity to reinforce point-to-point encryption technology with tokenization and managed communications in order to strengthen their payments infrastructure. We provide a complete solution that manages cardholder data securely in process, flight and storage. As a result, deploying our point-to-point encryption and tokenization solutions may also reduce the scope of a merchant’s PCI DSS compliance requirements, thereby lowering associated audit and operational costs.”

TNS’ tokenization solution is ideally suited for merchants that take recurring payments or need to store cardholder data for chargeback, reversal and marketing analytics, among other things. It is a robust solution which is suitable for card present and card-not-present payments. It replaces cardholder data in the merchant environment with a token that can be regularly submitted to TNS when payments are due. TNS stores the cardholder information on behalf of the merchant within its secure, PCI-compliant environment.

George Peabody, Senior Director at Glenbrook Partners, said: “Consumers place trust in merchants when they share their personal cardholder data and if this trust is violated through a data breach it damages that merchant’s reputation and bottom line. Large merchants, in particular, must manage large POS terminal estates and multiple channels. Unfortunately, vigilance is hard and, as we've seen, the cost of failure is high.

“EMV's arrival in the US won't reduce card data breach risk for many years. In the meantime, merchants need to think beyond PCI compliance and look at overall risk reduction. Point-to-point encryption solutions offer a valuable toolset to accomplish that goal. If there's nothing valuable to steal, the attacker will move on to an easier target.”

Founded in 1990, TNS’ global expertise extends to more than 60 countries across Europe, the Americas and the Asia Pacific regions. Through its broader payment solutions offering, TNS connects over a million retailers and other merchants to the world’s leading banks, acquirers and processors, enabling secure, efficient and cost-effective delivery and processing of payments.

For more information about TNS, please visit www.tnsi.com.

ENDS

About Transaction Network Services:

Transaction Network Services (TNS) is a leading global provider of data communications and interoperability solutions. TNS offers a broad range of networks and innovative value-added services which enable transactions and the exchange of information in diverse industries such as retail, banking, payment processing, telecommunications and the financial markets.

TNS has designed and implemented multiple data networks which support a variety of widely accepted communications protocols and are designed to be scalable and accessible by multiple methods.

For further information about TNS, visit www.tnsi.com.