Eldon, a British insurance broker specialising in personal and commercial insurance, has chosen Semafone™’s award-winning payment card security solution Cardprotect™, to secure card data belonging to customers who make payments over the phone.

Eldon, whose trading styles include GoSkippy Insurance and Vavista, has implemented Cardprotect through reseller Blackstar Solutions on a Gamma hosted platform across three global locations. Semafone’s patented payment method integrates into the market-leading desktop application for the insurance sector – Open GI – to secure all data that passes through the software.

Eldon will be the 17th organisation working in the insurance industry to have chosen Semafone to secure their telephone payments. The new scalable system will deliver the flexibility to double the handling capacity of the company’s three contact centres in Southampton, Bristol and South Africa. The contact centres will also be fully compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), to ensure customers’ payment card data is secured to the highest standard.

Dave Taylor, Operations Director at Eldon, said, “Operating in the financial services sector, regulation from the Financial Conduct Authority is already heavy. We were finding the additional PCI DSS compliance for telephone payments increasingly expensive and complicated. With Cardprotect, the data stays in the cloud and doesn’t enter our systems or environment at all, giving us peace of mind. PCI DSS compliance is now straightforward and we can focus fully on customer service. As Semafone’s solution integrates seamlessly with our existing desktop application, all our agents were on board and saying how easy to use the system was by the end of the first day.”

Simon Edwards, Head of Operations at Blackstar commented, “By implementing Semafone’s Cardprotect on a platform hosted by Gamma, we have provided Eldon with a fully flexible solution. This means that the company can adapt to fluctuations in demand, such as an increase in payments during peak periods, while at the same time ensuring compliance with PCI DSS and other regulations. We are proud to be working with Semafone to provide Eldon with a solution that not only protects its customers but will grow with the business.”

Semafone CEO Tim Critchley commented, “Our research shows that people continue to want to pay over the phone. To ensure the needs of customers are being met it’s essential to provide this channel, but also to make sure that payment card data is handled securely. We’re thrilled to be working with a growing number of insurers, including Eldon, to protect customer data from threats both inside and outside the contact centre, but also to lessen the burden of compliance in an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.”