Industry leaders partner to create best-of-breed PCI-compliance solution suite for secure voice payment processing

Leading communications intelligence and analytics solutions provider, Cognia, and secure voice payment specialist, Semafone, announced a partnership that will enable contact centers world-wide to transform the security and compliance costs of handling customer payment information.

By combining the skills and technology of Cognia and Semafone, a new breed of solution will be available to the market that will allow contact center agents to take customer card payments in line with international Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) without the substantial compliance and security costs, and operational limitations associated with traditional approaches such as pause-and-resume recording.

Both companies are innovators in their fields. Last year Cognia became the world’s first provider to achieve QSA-validated compliance with PCI DSS as a Level 1 Service Provider on a global cloud platform. Semafone who is also a PCI DSS Level 1 accredited Service Provider, holds a PA-DSS certification for its payment solution and is also a Visa level 1 merchant agent; its secure payment processing solutions are rapidly becoming an industry standard for agent-on-call secure payment processing and its customer base spans five continents.

The suite of services will include PCI-compliant DTMF-masking, automated IVR payment processing, agent monitoring and recording, and secure archiving for legacy ‘at-risk’ media. A combination of on-premise and cloud based deployment models will be available for ultimate local to global scalability.

Curtis Nash, CEO of Cognia commented, “The crucial element in this alliance is about delivering more choice and greater flexibility to customers. As two leading innovators in the payment processing and communications capture and analytics cloud space, we feel that the strength of our solutions working together will lead the market for secure payment processing in an area where the security threat is still high and where enterprises of all types need to assure a low security risk as well as compliance.”

Tim Critchley, CEO of Semafone added, “The risk of fraudulent activity in the cardholder not present sector is growing as criminals use increasingly more sophisticated technology to obtain personal payment data. Customers now hold brands to account for the protection of their card details and will simply shop elsewhere if they feel that their security is at risk. Our partnership with Cognia marks another milestone in the battle against card fraud and in the protection of our customers’ brand & reputation.”