Step 1 – Register at elavonsecuritymanager.com

You’ll receive two login emails from Secured by Elavon with your username and password for registration.

Step 2 – Complete PCI DSS questionnaire

Once registered, you will be guided through the compliance validation process to achieve certification straight away, certainly no later than 90 days from the date your account is opened to avoid the PCI non-compliance fee.

Step 3 – Receive PCI DSS certification

After successfully confirming your business is processing card payments in a secure manner, we will send you your PCI DSS certification.

Benefits of becoming PCI compliant:

• Keeps your customer card data secure to industry regulations
• Avoid non-compliance fees, as you no longer pose a risk
• Avoid reputational damage in the event of a breach

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements for enhancing payment account data security.

These standards were developed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which was founded by Visa®, MasterCard®, JCB®, Discover® and American Express® to facilitate industry-wide adoption of consistent data security measures on a global basis.

Yes. Regardless of size, all businesses that store, process or transmit cardholder data must comply with the PCI DSS. The requirements apply to all acceptance channels including retail (bricks and mortar), mail/telephone order (MOTO) and ecommerce.

Data security is vital for any business that accepts credit and debit card payments, especially for small business merchants, which make up 91% of those affected by a data breach. This is an industry-wide problem, which the PCI DSS was designed to combat. No business is without risk.

The PCI DSS requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures is intended to proactively protect customer account data.

No. Merchants have been advised to take the PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) to identify potential security risks in order to achieve PCI compliance since 2010. The framework of the PCI Data Security standards is not new and has been required in different forms for some time now and continues to evolve.

All entities, merchants and service providers that store, process or transmit cardholder data must meet PCI DSS requirements. Requirements for certification vary, depending on the number of transactions an entity processes and the manner in which they are processed.

Elavon has partnered with leading PCI DSS compliance service providers to help you evaluate the status of your account, to assist with any necessary remediation efforts and to certify your account's PCI compliance.

If you have any queries regarding your merchant account or general PCI questions, please contact Elavon Customer Service:+44 (0) 345 850 0195 (select Option 2).

No. There are many qualified security assessors (QSAs) and approved scanning vendors (ASVs). You are free to choose to certify with any vendor you like. If you choose to use a third-party QSA/ASV, you must upload your compliance certificate via our PCI portal.

If you do not comply with the security requirements of the card associations, you put your organisation at risk of payment card compromise. You will also be liable for the cost of the required forensic investigations, fraudulent purchases and the cost of re-issuing cards. You may also lose your credit card acceptance privileges.

Elavon might impose additional fees for each month that your account has not been validated as PCI compliant or in any given month your account is deemed non-compliant. You must maintain your compliant status once it is obtained in order to prevent this fee in the future.

The minimum requirement for a level 4 merchant is to complete a PCI DSS Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) on an annual basis and achieve a passing score. If you electronically store cardholder information or if your processing systems have any internet connectivity, a quarterly network vulnerability scan by an approved scanning vendor is also required.

It depends how complex your card handling environment is, but on average completion takes 20 minutes.

A vulnerability scan is an automated, non-intrusive scan that assesses your network and web applications from the internet (on the external-facing IPs).

The scan will identify any vulnerabilities or gaps that may allow an unauthorised or malicious user to gain access to your network and potentially compromise cardholder data. The scans will not require you to install any software on their systems, and no denial-of-service attacks will be performed.

For merchants who require quarterly scans, any associated cost will be built into the price quoted upon in our PCI Programme. If additional IP addresses are added to your business between scans, there may be additional costs.

If you fail the network vulnerability scan, this means that the scan discovered areas of vulnerability in your network of high severity. These vulnerabilities should be remediated and another scan should be performed to ensure there are no further vulnerabilities. We will help guide you to remediate a failed scan and work toward achieving compliance.

First, you will want to login to our PCI Portal to review the scan results. The report will provide a description of the identified issues and resources to begin fixing the problems. You will need to address each of the problems and then schedule a directed scan to ensure your remediation of the problem meets the PCI DSS.

As part of becoming PCI compliant, you may be required to upgrade your equipment and/or software to a PCI DSS certified version. You must contact your equipment and/or software vendor to discuss what options may be available and the costs associated with those options, if any. The cost associated with any equipment and/or software upgrade will not be covered by Elavon.

If your business locations process under the same tax ID, location address and IP addresses, you are only required to certify once for all locations. Please contact our customer assisstance team via 'Contact Details' on the PCI Portal. If your business locations have different tax IDs, you will need to certify once per tax ID, location address and IP address.

The length a PCI compliance certificate is valid depends on whether your business requires a questionnaire or scan.

If your business only requires the annual questionnaire, PCI certification is valid for one year. If your business requires quarterly scans, PCI certification is valid for three months, at which time your next quarterly scan will be due.

If you change the manner in which you store, process or transmit cardholder data, you may increase the vulnerability of your business and you must contact your PCI portal customer assistance team for re-certification.

If you have been PCI DSS certified within the past several months, through another approved scan vendor, please submit all of your certification documentation to us so that we know that your account is currently PCI compliant. Access our PCI Portal and upload your PCI certificate.

If you would like more detailed information, please visit the PCI Security Standards Council website

If time isn’t on your side, you can opt to hand the PCI compliance process over to us to manage for you.

Secured Pro offers a dedicated account management and enhanced protection against fraud and payment security breaches including:

• A committed team to help you through the certification process
• Notifications to when you’re due for renewal or need to action anything –no need to remember dates and details
• Extensive system security scan checks to find any vulnerabilities
• If you are breached and compliant, you will have access to our PCI waiver programme to cover up to GBP 60,000 of the incurred costs

If you have already validated PCI compliance for your business via a PCI Program other than Elavon's, you must supply proof of validation.

Please register at elavonsecuritymanager.com and upload your PCI certificate.