Payments Security, With A Dash Of Humor

Payments security is usually not a wellspring for belly laughs. But Vantiv Integrated Payments, which offers payments technology to small and mid-sized businesses, has been moving forward with its campaign to stir business owners to action, with sobering stats and a little humor.

In June, the company said that it is launching the next phase of its Security Pays initiative, which traces its genesis to August of last year and, at present, includes more than 1,000 of Vantiv’s partners around the United States. The new phase of outreach targets SMBs under the umbrella program known as More Secure Ways To Pay. There’s a monetary incentive tied to the program which helps eligible merchants cover their expenses as they elect to upgrade to more secure payments hardware.

The current version of Security Pays has three components, according to Vantiv. First, there are the “Jack Vs.” video segments that bring a bit of humor to bear on educating businesses about security threats and how business owners, utilizing technology, can stop those threats. There’s also the Security Pays Challenge, which offers up a three-part quiz centered on how to keep customer cardholder data secure and includes a contest to win up to $5,000. Finally, there’s the Security Swatches segment, which gives what Vantiv terms “easy-to-understand” answers in order to get a sense of how to avoid pitfalls in processing debit and credit cards without the security features of EMV technology.

The campaign continues through July 31, 2016.

Matt Downs, head of business and channel development for Integrated Payments at Vantiv, stated: “We are using humor and straightforward information to get across the serious message our partners and business owners need to hear — that thousands of small businesses were breached in 2015 and 60 percent of those who were breached did not survive.”

“We are here to educate everyone on the risks, work with our partners on new equipment and encourage business owners to take the next steps to help secure their payments process with EMV, tokenization and point-to-point encryption,” he continued. “We are including NFC technology inside all of the partners’ software, and the devices that we are deploying to our businesses are NFC-enabled.”

“So, if you use Apple Pay, Samsung Pay or any of the digital wallets, it comes with a large security component built in. We’ve embedded the next stage of payment security as part of this program, and we’ve laid a foundation through the semi-integrated platforms, should something new arrive, that will make it easier for us to deploy in the future.”