"Security in payments transactions is critical in today's environment of cyber crime and data breaches," commented Bob Carr, Heartland's chairman and chief executive officer. "It's important that merchants nationwide - even those not employing Heartland's E3 terminals which are expected to be available at the end of this year -have the ability to protect cardholder data. Our strategic relationship with Hypercom will help make E3 more widely available."

"As one of the top processors in the country, Heartland is helping change the landscape of payment transactions security," said Philippe Tartavull, Hypercom's chief executive officer and president. "We will expand payment processing services and help Heartland implement the next generation of end-to-end card data protection for merchants and consumers nationwide."

Heartland is licensing Hypercom's SmartPaymentsTM Server Software products as key components of its host electronic transaction processing platform. Branded as Heartland Connect GatewayTM, this software will enable Hypercom® point-of-sale systems to integrate E3 technology which is designed to protect card data from the moment of swipe through transmission to the card brands. The gateway will also allow Hypercom terminals and others to support E3.

SmartPayments will facilitate Heartland's ability to offer E3 to several key markets by providing an infrastructure and total solution that supports restaurant, hotel and retail, mobile commerce, IP terminals, an e-commerce virtual terminal solution for card-not-present and card-present transactions including debit. SmartPayments provides the ability to support integrated plug-ins for Microsoft's Retail Management System (RMS) and Intuit's QuickBooks accounting packages.