Owners of websites and online stores must provide customers who want to buy a product or service with secure payment services. Acquiring banks and issuing banks are involved in real-time transactions. For effective interaction between them, it is worth involving a commercial service that provides a payment gateway. It allows information about transactions to be transmitted to recipients and to provide a response to payers regarding the approval or rejection of the transfer by the cardholder. Gateways process transactions by using their APIs, which speed up the process and ensure data security.
Payment gateway – a profitable solution
3D Secure technology, with all its effectiveness, degrades conversion. Therefore, it is worth paying attention to a more profitable solution – a PCI DSS compliant payment gateway that supports an authenticated tokenization process when accepting payments from mobile applications and online stores. The payment gateway solves the following tasks:
- Confidential information is replaced by unique identification characters during tokenization.
- The gateway provides a high level of security in the process of interaction between the participants in the “buyer-merchant-bank” chain.
- The commercial service providing the gateway acts as an intermediary and guarantees the card number and secret code confidentiality.
- Through a gateway combined with PCI, the information that the cardholder enters to make an online payment is securely encrypted.
- The gateway provides complete protection of information from third-party access through the use of comprehensive security measures.
The operating algorithm of a PCI compliant payment gateway can be summarized as follows. The site visitor decides to pay for the purchase with a card and enters the payment information on the checkout page. The payment gateway encrypts the information and safely sends the information to the merchant’s acquiring bank for authorization. At the same time, the request is sent to the card issuing bank to check the means of payment and balance. After confirming the transaction, the payment system gives an answer to the acquirer and the gateway, and the money is debited from the account.
Confidentiality of payments through the gateway
The site owner is obliged to provide buyers with complete confidentiality of personal and financial information. Therefore, transactions must comply with the DSS PCI requirements. After completing a monetary transaction, it is prohibited to store the information in the payment terminal of the outlet. The use of a PCI compliant gateway allows e-commerce participants to resolve this issue. To ensure data confidentiality, the gateway encrypts cardholder information using a set of the following security measures:
- use of combinations of cryptographic algorithms;
- use of encryption keys with dual control;
- use of a reliable protocol for protecting information during transmission;
- a secure connection between the server and the client’s browser;
- use of program code that deletes a transaction record.
After a successful payment, information about the card is deleted from the server’s memory. When data passes through a gateway that meets the PCI DSS standard, the information enters the acquirer and issuer systems in encrypted form. It ensures secure e-commerce purchases.