Pan-African integrated payments firm Interswitch Transnational has been awarded the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS), the highest global security certification, for the third year in a row.
The award is the globally accepted set of policies and procedures intended to optimize the security of credit, debit and prepaid card transactions and protect cardholders against misuse of their personal information.
According to Mr. Mitchell Elegbe, Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Interswitch Transnational: “We are delighted to have achieved PCIDSS for the third year in a row. At Interswitch we are committed to maintaining the highest standards of security for our customers and are continually looking for ways to strengthen our fraud management strategy. So successful have we been that our transaction to fraud ratio is now less than 0.1%.”
At the moment, Interswitch is the only company in West Africa to have achieved PCIDSS and is using its experience to assist its partner banks to also achieve PCIDSS.
The award of PCIDSS is carried out independently by an external qualified security assessor (QSA) and by an approved scanning vendor (ASV) who test for vulnerability.
The transaction to fraud ratio is the number of transactions divided by the number that are fraudulent expressed as a percentage. The global best practice average for the fraud to transaction ratio is between 1 – 3.99%.
