CardEasy wins another ‘PCI Award for Excellence’ for its success with Staples in Europe

Syntec won its second consecutive PCI Award for Excellence at this year’s ceremony in London for its CardEasy ‘keypad payment by phone’ system, in recognition of its pan-European secure phone payments solution for office supply retailer Staples.

The PCI Awards for Excellence recognise and honour the industry’s most outstanding examples of best practice in payment security and PCI DSS projects and implementations.

CardEasy is Syntec’s patented PCI DSS solution for ‘cardholder not present’ phone payments and for de-scoping call centres from PCI DSS regulations and controls, as well as helping merchants with their upcoming GDPR compliance needs in this environment.

Staples started rolling out CardEasy in their various UK call centres in 2016, deploying the hybrid ‘on premise’ option with their existing Cisco telephony and various back office systems and returning a tokenized PAN for repeat-purchase use.

Training support was provided by Syntec and the results went so smoothly that Staples took up their option to roll CardEasy out to other European sites with hundreds of users – a project which was successfully completed in 2017.

CardEasy works in mid-conversation between the customer and agent, allowing the paying customer to key in their card details on their touchtone (DTMF) phone handset, whilst remaining connected to the call centre agent conversation throughout. CardEasy also works as a customer self-service (IVR-automated) system and is developed and fully supported by Syntec, a PCI DSS level 1 service provider, Visa Merchant Agent and participating member organization of the global PCI Security Standards Council.

CardEasy de-scopes call centres from PCI DSS regulations and controls by preventing agents from hearing or seeing the sensitive payment card numbers, automatically blocking them from call & screen recordings and preventing them from entering the contact centre’s systems and networks – so they are no longer available to be seen, heard, stored or compromised.

Colin Westlake, Managing Director of Syntec commented, “I’m delighted that CardEasy has been recognised with this further PCI Award for Excellence, at a time when data security and consumer protection continue to rise up the agenda for merchants and the general public alike. I’m particularly pleased that this is for our work with such a large international merchant as Staples, as part of the international expansion of our CardEasy service which is now in use across Europe and North America with other countries now also in the pipeline.”

Jurgen van Roon, Senior Project Manager (Security), Staples, commented, “CardEasy was the perfect fit to resolve the PCI compliance and data security needs in Staples’ major call centres in Europe. This was because of its ease of use mid-call, the breadth of PCI DSS issues it resolves in one go, the flexibility of integration with all our differing systems and the ability for them to meet our tokenisation requirements.”

The system is available in Syntec network-hosted and hybrid premise-based versions, supporting both SIP, ISDN or any mix of the two. With SIP-based telephony, a fully cloud-based variant removes the need for any premise-based equipment. All versions use the CardEasy cloud for their PSP connections and the hybrid and cloud options work with the client’s existing telephony provider.

Pre-integration with all the leading payment gateways means that CardEasy can be deployed by merchants without any need for changing existing systems, telephony or working methods. The customer/call centre agent experience is also enhanced, by improving trust and also shortening calls by removing the need for the customer to read out their numbers for the agent to take down and enter.

“Syntec’s successful projects include implementations for companies as diverse as Staples, Miele, Allied Irish Bank, Charles Tyrwhitt, Iglu.com and also Locus Telecommunications in the USA.” says Robert Walker, Managing Director of AKJ Associates and founder of the PCI Excellence Awards. “Feedback from these blue-chips firms demonstrates the value customers see in the CardEasy solution, and the detailed case studies provide other end-users with valuable insights when it comes to their own projects.”