We are pleased to welcome all our new PCI SVA members, and look forward to working with them to offer trusted, proven solutions that enable the payment card industry and merchants to protect the privacy of consumer information and other sensitive data," said David Taylor, VP of Data Security Strategies for Protegrity, one of the founding members of the PCI SVA.

In InformationWeek magazine last week, Visa USA President and CEO, John Coghlan, emphasized the importance of PCI compliance, insisting that technology is the solution to combating fraud -- not the cause of it. According to the article, in the past year compliance to the PCI data security standards has doubled from less than 15% to about one-third among Level 1 merchants, those that process more than 6 million transactions annually. Obviously, that leaves a lot of large merchants non-compliant. To correct this, Visa in December announced it would this year hand out more than $20 million in incentives to merchants to encourage them to become PCI compliant. Part of this comes from charging merchants lower interchange fees for doing business with Visa. Coghlan said Visa would offer its lowest fees to merchants that validate PCI compliance by Sept. 30, 2007, a savings that can vary from $250,000 to $20 million annually, depending upon the volume of business the merchant does with Visa.

The PCI SVA was formed to work with the payment card industry -- including merchants, banks, payment processors and point-of-sale vendors - to develop their "roadmap to PCI DSS compliance" - showing them how to efficiently achieve compliance with the PCI Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). The members of the PCI SVA view the PCI DSS as the best available framework to guide an organization in how to protect sensitive data and reduce the risk of a security breach. PCI SVA members, all with strong experience in delivering PCI compliance products and services to thousands of customers, will leverage their combined knowledge to support the objectives of the payment card industry by securing sensitive data processed by their merchant partners with best-of-breed PCI DSS solutions that address the needs of any enterprise that seeks a clearly defined, highly auditable data protection framework.

To demonstrate the business value of PCI DSS solutions, and their value in meeting other regulatory privacy and data security directives, the PCI SVA will publish educational white papers, case studies and return-on-investment (ROI) analyses. In addition, the PCI SVA will host a series of Webinars and in-person seminars to help organizations develop their PCI DSS compliance roadmaps. Finally, the PCI SVA website will host the PCI Security Technology Forum, where any organization (vendors and users) can discuss the security technologies that are critical to achieving PCI DSS compliance. 

About PCI SVA PCI SVA (http://www.pcialliance.org) assists members of the payment card industry, composed of merchants, banks and point-of-sale vendors, in educating the business community on the requirements and business value of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, a global benchmark intended to improve security throughout the entire payment card transaction process.