When implemented, VeriShield Total Protect will use industry-proven security technology and leverage electronic payment systems deployed in the majority of merchants world-wide to provide a consistent, consolidated approach to protecting payment card data from end-to-end, both pre- and post-authorization.

"Until today, merchants have had to navigate among a variety of technical offerings in order to protect customers and meet compliance requirements for credit card transactions," said VeriFone CEO Douglas G. Bergeron. "RSA and VeriFone are combining to solve this problem and let merchants focus on meeting customer needs, not mastering security protocols. VeriFone's and RSA's industry pedigrees create a gold-standard offering that processors and merchants can unify around as a single, stable answer to their security concerns."

In addition to proven technology, the goal of the strategic partnership is to bring extensive implementation and business enablement resources to processors to ensure successful deployment of the service within their infrastructure and sales channels. This will ensure broad availability and a deployment model that offers the greatest degree of risk reduction and PCI DSS scope reduction.

Processors will market the solution to merchants as a means to reduce cost and effort associated with PCI compliance, gain new abilities to safely use transaction data to support customer analytics and drastically reduce their overall risk profile. VeriFone's VeriShield Hidden Encryption (VHE) preserves both data format and data field structure, so end-to-end encryption can be implemented without major retrofit with existing retailer POS systems. Elements of RSA's SafeProxyTM architecture tokenize card data for safe storage and use by merchants post-authorization.

RSA President Art Coviello added, "Our collaboration advances the development of a payment industry ecosystem with pervasive built-in security. Our joint solution will ensure that payment processors don't have to make compromises and can deliver a service that confidently answers their customers data security concerns. By delivering this service, we will enable processors to focus on innovating to serve their merchant customer base, not on becoming security experts."

VeriFone will be offering VHE algorithms royalty-free to any point-of-sale producer interested in offering their customers compatibility with VeriShield Total Protect.