For a business that accepts payments online, being able to save customer payment information is an added convenience that can encourage repeat purchases and removes the need to re-enter card information for every single payment.
But storing payment data is a big responsibility. What if your company has a security breach? What if your server is hacked? Online businesses are all vulnerable to these risks at different levels.
With card-on-file technology, which allows you to store payment information on a secure server, the protection of a buyer’s sensitive information doesn’t have to be a worry — just a priority.
Improving Customer Experience
Card-on-file products such as Worldline’s Secure Payment Profiles allow you to “remember” and protect payment credentials, but you don’t have to keep the data on your server. In Worldline’s case, we do that for you on our PCI Level 1 certified secure server.
With payment profiles, you can process one-off payments, recurring transactions, subscriptions, contract payments, and more. Storing the data removes the consumer’s need to re-enter their card information every time they want to make a purchase online.
Removing obstacles for a potential buyer while also ensuring the protection of their confidential data is a win-win.
Secure “Hands Off” Approach to Card Data
Additional tools such as tokenization, the industry standard for data security, can be used to encrypt sensitive data to safeguard your business from potential liability. Tokenizing data means it’s encrypted and even in the case of a data breach, no one would be able to decode the information.
Payment profiles and tokenization can be used together; in fact, it’s highly recommended. If businesses use payment profiles and encrypt the information this way, your servers won’t touch the data at any point, which lowers your security scope.
Safe Storage and Transfer
A payment profile isn’t limited to storing one credit card. Multiple cards can be conveniently stored on a single payment profile. Name, billing address, email address, and shipping address can also be saved.
This data can be updated, deleted, and moved at any time. If a business owner needs to switch payment providers, the new and old provider can work together to facilitate the export/import of profile data.
At Worldline, we also use encryption to ensure the safe transfer of customer profiles to and from your old provider—which again completely bypasses your servers and removes your liability.
If you use Worldline or are curious about Secure Payment Profiles, please reference our help documentation and developer documentation, or contact Worldline’s Customer Care team.