Online businesses have become a major part of the world we live in today. Not only it makes the commerce process easier for the business by providing them an easy and simple way of selling goods and services, but also for customers by simplifying the buying process and giving them more choices. Days when we had to go to the physical shop to purchase goods or services are long gone, now the entire world is literally in the palm of our hand. Even the banking industry has started to undergo digital transformation to make it possible for everyone to access the financial services from their devices. Our devices give us the chance to buy the goods or services from anywhere in the world, and have it delivered to us in a matter of days. 

Truth is that e-commerce comes with so many benefits, that most people hardly think about the downsides. This new world of e-commerce is also providing new possibilities for cyber criminals to access the confidential details of businesses and customers and to use it for their own benefit. Duty of every business dealing with private confidential customer details, especially when dealing with their banking details, is to do everything in their power to protect them. When it comes to the area of e-commerce that means that a merchants primary duty is to ensure that the transactions on your website are secure. 

The process of online payment transactions consists of five elements and they are: the client, the merchant, the client's financial institution, the merchant's financial institution and the payment gateway. Payment gateway is the last and most important step in defense against cyber attacks which is why it is extremely important to secure it.

What is a Payment gateway?

The payment gateway in the most simplest terms is a merchant service used to process the card payments. In more broader terms, payment gateway is used to provide a secure connection that will carry out transactions and to verify, accept or even decline transactions on behalf of a merchant. It is used for ecommerce sites but also for the traditional brick and mortar stores. It might sound technical, but you can always compare a payment gateway to a normal cash register, but instead of being used for cash payments it is used for electronic transactions. And just like you use any means possible to keep the standard cash register secure, the same needs to be done also with the payment gateway.

How To Secure Your Payment Gateway

As a merchant you always need to keep the security of your customers your top priority for more reasons than the obvious ones. Not only that endangering customer details puts them at risk, but also the cost of recovery from data breach is $4.24 million according to the study from 2021, which is the highest ever recorded. Not many businesses can recover from that, especially when data breach also means losing the trust of even the unaffected customers. 

In order to avoid this happening to your business, read about the five ways you can use it to secure your payment gateway.

Data Enrichment. This is a process of taking raw data from different sources and enriching the initial data. This can help you to create a unique profile of your customers before they even make a purchase and to confirm their identity before completing payment. By using data enrichment to secure your payment gateway you can compare customers' email or even IP addresses with the internal and external databases to see if it was involved with any previous data breaches or if it happens to be on any spam blacklists. This way you can prevent fraud attempts before it does any serious damage. It might sound complicated, but it actually is not that complicated.

Reverse Email Lookup. It is a great tool to ensure the security of all your customers because you can create a complete user profile just by using their email. Every person has their online presence on different platforms, which makes it easy to recognize the cyber criminals as their online presence won't be detailed. 

Data encryption. This is one of the most important methods payment gateways use to secure the data. The moment a customer enters their card details, they will be encrypted and then they can only be decrypted by private key from the payment gateway. This way the customer data is protected during transmission from the gateway to the acquiring bank. 

Transport Layer Security (TLS). This is used to provide secure data transfers over various public channels, like a web server and a browser. By using this process your payment gateway will encrypt all sensitive data that is sent from one system to another so that cyber criminals won't be able to recognize the data if they try to access it.

Secure Electronic Transaction (SET). This protocol is a great tool that is used to secure the transfer of any customer's card details during an online transaction because it blocks out the details of the card so not even the merchant can't access it. 

As a merchant you need to be aware that nobody is immune to cybersecurity issues and you need to stay proactive in order to ensure the security of your business and your customers. Don't wait for something bad to happen before you take all the necessary action. The only business that will stay safe are the ones that take active measures in cybersecurity.