After a tremendous combined effort from our team, Toqio is delighted to share that it recently achieved full Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) certification. This information security standard is the industry benchmark in card data protection and sensitive card information management. Its full implementation is a very complex, time-consuming task for any organization that requires highly specialized professionals, meticulously careful planning, and very precise execution.
Toqio’s certification demonstrates to all organizations that integrate Toqio’s bank-grade financial services platform that they will be able to offer their own customers the highest of industry standards in data security.
What is the PCI DSS?
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is the global reference point in card payment security. The five major card payment providers – Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, and JCB – initiated its creation to combat card payment fraud and provide a secure, safe environment for customer payment data.
The PCI Security Standards Council is the governing body for the compliance standard whose overarching role is “to enhance global payment account data security by developing standards and supporting services that drive education, awareness, and effective implementation by stakeholders.
Compliance with this protocol enables Toqio clients to enjoy a number of key benefits.
- Unrivalled customer trust
- PCI DSS is the industry standard seal of data security of approval.
- Data breach prevention
- PCI DSS compliance maximizes organizational and customer protection from data breaches and the reputation damage and possible fines that they can generate.
- Acts as a powerful baseline for other international regulatory frameworks
- Being PCI DSS-compliant makes certification completion of other important regulatory frameworks more accessible
Customers want to feel safe when making card payments, especially in card-not-present transactions. However, card fraud has been on the rise as fraudsters develop increasingly sophisticated methods. According to the FIS Global Payment Risk Mitigation Report 2021, 38% of merchants lost 6% or more of revenue to payments fraud in 2020, while 59% of merchants reported higher rates of card-not-present fraud in the same year. This development has occurred as e-commerce has surged in recent years, propelled further by the pandemic-induced migration to digitalization.
E-retail sales in 2021 rose to $4.9 trillion and are expected to reach $7.4 trillion by 2025. Moreover, tap-to-pay transactions experienced a 30% growth rate from 2020 to 2021.
Full compliance with the PCI DSS protocol confers a number of important advantages to organizations, including merchant and end-customer trust, minimization of fraud, and full compliance with card data protection standards. Without PCI DSS compliance, organizations are at substantially greater risk of higher levels of payment fraud, loss of customers to PCI DSS-compliant competitors, lower sales volumes, possible fraud-related fines and penalties, and higher costs associated with a possible increase in legal procedure and court case frequency. With PCI DSS certification, merchants and end-customers can immediately identify full commitment to, and compliance with, the global benchmark in card payment protection industry standards.
What does PCI DSS Certification Mean for Toqio Clients?
With PCI DSS certification, Toqio offers its client partners the industry benchmark in security infrastructure, all built on Amazon Web Services, the global leader in cloud technology.
Some of the main capabilities for Toqio clients include cardholder data management access directly from the Toqio platform and secure card integration with bank providers.
This Toqio infrastructure includes comprehensive, state-of-the-art technology measures in:
- CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- DDoS Protection
- Web Application and Instance-Level Firewalls
- Intrusion Detection System
- Network-Level Firewall
As a result clients access and use Toqio’s suite of embedded finance solutions in the knowledge that they provide best-of-breed policies in:
- Vulnerability Testing
- Two-Factor Authentication Password Protection Policy
- Information Security
- Card Payment Anti-Fraud Architecture
- Comprehensive Card Data Management
A Bank-Grade Financial Services Platform
With PCI DSS compliance, Toqio offers financial institutions two categories of industry benchmark solutions.
Ready made digital solutions
One, a suite of plug-and-play banking-as-a-service platforms, including digital customer onboarding, accounts, payments, and card management and expenses.
Beast-of-breed product design environment
Two, a fully secure, PCI-compliant development infrastructure within which to design digital products from the ground up via powerful APIs purpose-built for financial accounting, banking and other finance-related applications.
Toqio is already partnered with some of the world’s leading financial institutions and fintech organizations through the company’s out-of-the-box product suite. However, for certain, especially highly specific, financial applications, an organization may wish to build their own product instead. With this in mind, Toqio offers advanced embedded finance solutions to address the product requirements of all financial service providers.