Visa's Mandate for Merchants to be PCI Compliant - Deadline is July 1, 2010

Electronic payment applications with credit card processing MUST meet PA-DSS
(Payment Application - Data Security Standards)

Deadline to enforce the requirement is July 1, 2010. If you are a merchant and you are NOT compliant - you may find that your merchant account service provider (bank)will not be able to process your credit card payment transactions!

Specifically - Visa will NOT allow financial institutions who provide merchant account service(Acquirers)to sign up merchant accounts for companies who use payment applications that are NOT in compliance with these security standards.

This is being driven by valid concerns over the increasing incidents involving large amounts of credit card data being breeched and or stolen annually. As a result, a data security council was formed by the payment industry to adopt Visa's PABP (Payment Application Best Practices) security initiatives. The mandate is to ensure that all electronic payment applications with credit card processing MUST meet PA-DSS (Payment Application - Data Security Standards) to guard against cyberdata thefts.

This reinforces the fact that PCI Compliance is no longer an option for businesses accepting credit card payments. All merchants must be in compliance with PCI or they will be subject to huge fines.

For more information regarding PCI compliance, please visit the Visa website at the below URLs for more information! http://usa.visa.com/merchants/risk_management/cisp_merchants.html
http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/payment_application_security_mandates.pdf