Cognia
Secure PCI Compliance Solutions

Payment card data is extremely sensitive and can leave both organizations and customers open to data security breaches, costing millions of dollars. Organizations that store, process or transmit payment card information must ensure that the data is managed and stored in line with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). Therefore, for the contact centers, where it is indispensible to record the customer conversations, it is necessary that ‘payment data’ be left out of their recordings. To achieve this, contact centers rely on applications that pause call recording, while getting payment card details and resume once completed. “A pause and resume application can be manually intensive, with chances for human or system error. If the agents forget to pause the recording, the payment data can enter contact center systems, leaving the organizations at risk of data breach or non-compliance fine, and damage to both brand and customer experience,” says Curtis Nash, Founder and CEO, Cognia. “We solve the problem by integrating with the existing network, and extracting the issue out of the contact center, thereby reducing compliance burdens and improving processes while allowing payments to be taken securely.”

The company offers Cognia Secure – Dual Tone Multi-frequency (DTMF), a cloud-based PCI compliant payment-processing platform that carries the call traffic in two parts, through voice and DTMF channels. While the voice channel ensures continuous conversation, DTMF allows the data input through the mobile keypad. The platform allows customers to enter their card details via the phone keypad, when prompted by the agent while on the call. The transaction is shown on the agents’ screen, enabling them to track the progress, but the payment card data never enters the contact center. Cognia Secure – DTMF completes the transaction directly with the payment service provider.

Cognia is the world’s first cloud service provider to achieve QSA-validated PCI DSS Level 1 compliance for its global cloud telephony and payment service platform

“Cognia is the world’s first cloud service provider to achieve QSA-validated PCI DSS Level 1 compliance for its global cloud telephony and payment service platform,” extols Nash. “The platform effortlessly removes the burden and scope of PCI DSS compliance from contact center processes and infrastructure, at the same time removing more than 90 percent of the enterprise costs associated with PCI compliance.”

Offered as SaaS model leveraging AWS, the Cognia Secure – DTMF is a flexible and scalable platform. It can provision customer calls to a new office abroad or let the contact center agent receive payments securely from home. “As our infrastructure is placed on a private cloud leveraging Amazon Web Services(AWS), it enables us to be a global service provider. We offer our services in the U.S., Canada, Asia-Pacific, and the UK,” says Nash.

Cognia also offers a suite of solutions to capture all voice and data communications between employees and customers, on any device, over any media channel, globally–as they happen. The communications are stored securely in policy-enforced on-premise data centers or in the cloud. In addition, Cognia’s interaction analytics allows organizations to search and analyze communications in real-time. The analytics helps spot non-compliant employee behavior; secure the businesses from potential fraud, protect a member of staff from an abusive customer, or analyze interaction for sales effectiveness.

Cognia’s solutions are used by more than 100 financial institutions worldwide, as well as public sector, travel, retail, communications, healthcare and Fortune 1000 firms. “We continue to transform the way businesses meet their most pressing PCI Compliance challenges for payment and recording, empowering organizations to succeed by making the most of communications in a way that is intelligent, secure, global and cloud-based, at a lower cost and risk than ever before,” concludes Nash.