Chase Paymentech has announced a joint initiative with VeriFone and Semtek to provide end-to-end encryption technologies for merchants to combat threats to security. The companies said they "will work together to market and distribute VeriFone’s VeriShield Protect solution to the Chase Paymentech base of retail merchants. The end-to-end encryption solution is designed to help merchants reduce the costs to comply with Payment Card Industry (PCI) requirements and associated security risk by protecting card information from the point of swipe to the Chase Paymentech authorization host." READ MORE

Hypercom and Heartland Payment Systems have announced a strategic relationship to deliver integrated, high-security payment systems to retailers nationwide and implement Heartland’s end-to-end encryption E3™ solution. READ MORE

Commidea, a card payment processing solution provider in the UK, has announce the launch of Ocius Sentinel - calling it "the UK's first solution to offer both true end-to-end dual encryption and tokenisation. Ocius Sentinel has been fully certified for use by the major UK acquiring banks." READ MORE

Visa has announced new global industry best practices for data field encryption, also known as end-to-end encryption. According to Visa, "the best practices are designed to further the payment industry's efforts to develop a common, open standard while providing guidance to encryption vendors and early adopters. Data field encryption protects card information from the swipe to the acquirer processor with no need for the merchant to process or transmit card data in the "clear."" The best practices document is available for download. READ MORE

Voltage Security, has announced it has extended Voltage SecureData™ by adding tokenization and data masking capabilities to the existing encryption functionality - enabling the end-to-end protection of data, such as credit card numbers, in applications and databases. Voltage SecureData says these additions provide "the most comprehensive end-to-end data protection solution available, giving customers the widest choice of protection options to simplify implementation, reduce PCI audit scope and lower costs." READ MORE

First Data and RSA have announced they are teaming up to provide a new service called First Data Secure Transaction Management - "engineered to enable merchants to secure payment card data and remove it from their environment while allowing access when needed." The new service "is designed to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of complying with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)." READ MORE

VeriFone Holdings has announced that RBS WorldPay has agreed to work jointly towards marketing VeriFone's VeriShield Protect end-to-end solution for encrypting payment card data. According to VeriFone, "RBS WorldPay is the first merchant acquirer to endorse a commercial end-to-end encryption solution. By encrypting the card number on swipe, right at the point of sale, RBS WorldPay merchants who choose the VeriShield Protect solution will be able to dramatically reduce both their own risk and that of their customers as well." READ MORE

Heartland Payment Systems has announced that yesterday it successfully completed the first phase of its end-to-end encryption pilot project. According to the company, "this first step involved the transmission of live AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)-encrypted card transactions from a merchant to Heartland’s processing platform. AES is the highest level of encryption and is currently on track to replace DES (Data Encryption Standard) and Triple DES as the desired standard for sensitive data."

Earlier this month Heartland announced it was working with Voltage Security to develop its end-to-end encryption approach. READ MORE

Mercator Advisory Group has published a new report, End-to-End Encryption: The Acquiring Side Responds to Data Loss and PCI Compliance that "explores end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in the hands of merchants, payment service providers and processors. In the face of the three bogies of PCI DSS compliance and penalties, reputational risk and direct financial loss, the acquiring half of the payments process is evaluating options for eliminating cleartext cardholder data from their systems. Tokenization (the subject of a recent Mercator report) and end-to-end encryption are the leading candidates. This report examines the complexity of E2EE within payments and enterprise security." READ MORE