Boston Retail Partners recommends EMV compliance, tokenization

Boston –- Between April and June of 2014, the retail sector led all industries in data breaches with 145 million records, or 83% of the total records compromised, costing retailers $195 per record apprehended. In response, Boston Retail Partners has released recommendations for data security best practices.



The recommendations include:



• Support EMV-based (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) transactions to validate the card authenticity for in-store purchases

• Implement a single encryption point at the time of swipe or data entry and a single decryption point at the processor (End-to-End Encryption)

• Implement tokenization at the earliest point possible outside of the environment and for all data at rest



“The challenge lies in deploying a comprehensive security strategy that mitigates risk, while at the same time protecting and maintaining corporate advances in unified commerce initiatives,” said Ken Morris, principal at Boston Retail Partners. “This will remain a hurdle amid growing customer expectations of a seamless experience across all retail touch points. The development of this strategy is critical, and must incorporate industry best practices in order to ensure an appropriate balance is struck between the customer experience and data security.”