The companies 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.

VeriShield Protect, which is compliant with Visa's best practices for data field encryption, also known as end-to-end encryption, is based on the AES encryption standard.

VeriFone Hidden Encryption, or VHE, based on Semtek's proprietary encryption technology, preserves the format of the card data, ensuring that the encrypted card data can be used by typical point-of-sale software systems with minimal modifications or disruption to the merchant. The solution eliminates the need for a merchant to process, transmit or store card data in the "clear."

"Protecting cardholder data and providing secure transaction processing for our merchants is paramount to the success of our business. As an industry leader it is our responsibility to provide proven, tested security solutions such as VeriFone's VeriShield Protect. As the newest component of our overall security suite of products, we're excited to be offering it to our retail customers," said Chase Paymentech president Mike Duffy.

"Chase Paymentech's leadership will make it easier for merchants to employ end-to-end encryption," said VeriFone CEO Douglas G. Bergeron. "The industry is rapidly coalescing around this solution as the best means to protect cardholder data in the retail environment."

Semtek CEO Patrick Hazel added, "Joining forces with Chase Paymentech will ensure that a significant merchant population will have full access to the best proven security solution available today. This is very good news for retailers and for consumers."