Businesses around the world are still adapting to the new virtual reality as a result of the pandemic, which includes managing a remote workforce. For those responsible for securing payment systems, this can present new, unknown territory.

Last year’s The State of Retail Payments study conducted for NRF revealed that between January and August of last year, touchless payments increased for more than two-thirds (69%) of surveyed retailers. Of those that had implemented contactless payments, almost all (94%) said they expected the rise to continue over the next year and a half.

Data breaches are a serious problem. According to the RiskBased Security Q3 2019 Data Breach QuickView Report, over 5,000 breaches amounting to 7.9 Billion records exposed occurred in the first nine months of 2019 alone.

It’s 2020, which makes it the perfect time to reflect on the past decade of payments — and to predict what the future holds. We’ve come a long way over the past ten years, witnessing the rise of e-commerce to m-commerce and undergoing a vast transformation away from analog into the digital world. 

We hope you have a wonderful thanksgiving with family and friends.

Becoming PCI compliant can be a tall order for any organization, but it can be especially tricky when there is a single person responsible for PCI compliance.

Do you have a thorough understanding of how credit cards and other payments are accepted across your university?

In Part I, we discussed the evolving nature of payments and how universities face a complex ecosystem of various vendors. Managing risk around all these vendors and ensuring compliance can be a tall order. In Part II, we look at more specific ways that universities can vet, validate, and assess vendor partnerships to ensure that PCI compliance is achieved and maintained. 

As a university, you likely work with a number of third party vendors across campus and departments to keep things running smoothly. When it comes to payments, keeping tabs on these vendors is a necessary but sometimes overwhelming function.

A Junto Institute podcast Featuring Bryan Jurewicz

With all the buzz about the upcoming PCI DSS v4.0 release, it can be helpful to understand the nuts and bolts of how an organization becomes (and remains) compliant.

If you’re reading this, your personal data has been exposed in a data breach. You’re another number, another statistic, another victim.

Finding out that you have been breached can throw your entire organization into crisis mode. The subsequent response may seem chaotic, scary, and overwhelming; but dealing with a breach—and being prepared to deal with a breach—can go a long way in ensuring your organization survives the aftermath.

We’ve written a few times about PCI DSS compliance here and here, but you should also know that the PCI Security Standards Council announced earlier this year that it has started planning the fourth version of the PCI DSS.

As a higher education institution, you are likely aware of the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). Adherence to these requirements is mandatory for all organizations (including all departments and campuses within a university) that process credit card transactions⁠—and PCI compliance must be certified annually. This is a huge undertaking, especially for universities that may not have buy-in or help from other integral departments.

As the guardians of all things cash management, payments, and bank account related, treasurers have an obligation to command control over fraud and security measures. According to the 2019 Treasury Fraud & Controls Survey Report issued by Strategic Treasurer and Bottomline Technologies, there are several areas of opportunity within treasuries to better combat fraud and close the gap on vulnerabilities. We explore the highlights of the report here.

Society is moving closer and closer toward a “cashless” way of life. Higher education is not exempt from this shift, though as large institutions that are often bogged down by legacy systems, many are falling behind the times when it comes to catering to younger generations.

PCI DSS compliance standards are quite complex and vary depending on how many and which types of credit transactions are processed each year. Merchants are required to go through a series of steps…

Verizon recently released its 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), which looked at 41,686 security incidents. Of those, 2,013 were confirmed data breaches. The report deep dives into the evolution of the threat landscape, who is perpetrating attacks, the top attack types, and assets affected by breaches.

Prepaid cards for college students seems like a commonsense thing. Prepaid cards enable students to access funds without the “danger” of overextending, as may be the case with credit cards.

Chargebacks or disputes are one of the least fun tasks that need to be handled when running a business.  Depending on the way you sell your goods and services, you can take steps to be sure that your business has put policies and protection in place to reduce everything from friendly fraud, merchant error, and criminal fraud.

Western Michigan University shares their experience of partnering with Arrow Payments to complete a campus-wide payment systems discovery and upgrade project in November of 2018.

Colleges and universities are becoming increasingly business-focused, seeking out new ways to process transactions and also to process the high volume of payments data resulting from those transactions.

“There are hundreds of millions of business printers in the world. Less than 2% of them are secure.” This is how a 2017 video ad from HP begins before unraveling a sinister plot where a hacker is able to gain access to a financial firm’s most sensitive data—through its printers.

By Rachel Blau, Arrow Payments Team Member Since 2012

Between lackluster security measures and emerging cyberthreats, higher education institutions are alert but not necessarily protected against the next big data breach.

Women's Business Enterprise certification awarded to Arrow Payments.