Our PED/ PIN Pad Encryption facility is up and running! Only "street legal" for about 30 days and to date, about 10,000 units in the queue to be encrypted.... We are quickly learning - there is still much to be learned here! As we go through the process, we thought we might be able to provide some additional "value" in this area to our customers by sharing some of what we are learning.
One thing that is worthy of passing along is: Watch who "owns" your banking encryption keys. There seems to be a better way to go about this than what seems to be the industry standard. From what we've seen, retailer's banking encryption keys are typically owned by their processor (think First Data). The challenge with this is, if you want to shop your relationship to say, Chase Paymentech, you will not be able to make that change without touching every unit in the field already deployed to put the new vendor's key in the PIN PADS.
How to avoid this? When negotiating your deal with the processor, negotiate the fact that you want to own your own key, NOT the processor. This will provide you with the flexibility to switch vendors whenever you want without having to update the key each time.
We'll keep you informed of any other tidbit's we learn along the way.
Happy Spring!
John Pruban
President
tekservePOS
