As well as giving consumers greater peace of mind, it reduces complexity, time, and cost for merchants to maintain or achieve their PCI DSS Compliance.

CardEase Ultra E2EE protects cardholder data throughout the merchant's business. It makes card payments more secure since the data does not exist in plaintext form, so cannot be compromised. Businesses will be able to take significant segments of their networks outside the scope of PCI DSS scope, reducing both infrastructure and compliance costs. Payment terminal manufacturers will also benefit by selling products with the technology built-in.

In the past five years Forgenix, an independent, information security specialist, discovered that in over 95% of compromises investigated, the business or merchant was not aware that the card data was even being held. The cost to a compromised merchant can be crippling - including bank fines for data loss, plus legal, forensic investigation and clean-up costs. But the biggest cost is the fraud liabilities for the compromised cards, estimated to be in the region of £750-1000/card ($1200-1600).

Jeremy Gumbley, CTO at CreditCall explained "End-to-End Encryption is set to revolutionize the card payment industry as it closes even more potential security loopholes and vulnerabilities. CardEase Ultra will enable organisations to reduce their PCI DSS scope, which will mean lower compliance and solution costs. Drawing on 14 years of global payment expertise, we expect to impact the payment industry positively by making end-to-end encryption available to a wide audience."

The solution will be available initially in the USA, supporting mag-stripe transactions and a Chip and PIN version will be launched later this year.