Copper Cellar Turns to Tokenization, Payment Gateway for Data Security

The Copper Cellar Corporation, which owns and operates 19 Copper Cellar, Calhoun's, Smoky Mountain Brewery, Cherokee Grill and Chesapeake's restaurants, recently installed TransactionVault, Merchant Link's tokenization solution, and the Merchant Link Payment Gateway across all of their locations in Knoxville, Nashville, Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, Maryville and Lenoir City.

 

The company chose to utilize these solutions to safeguard customers’ sensitive payment data and remove it from the premise to ensure that it is transmitted safely and effectively, while reducing their PCI DSS compliance footprint.

 

"It's comforting to not have to worry about the security of our guests' credit card information," says Mike Gaston, vice president of information services for Copper Cellar Corporation. "The fact that it is not stored anywhere on our network is a huge relief."

 

The Merchant Link Payment Gateway sends payments quickly, while detecting and correcting errors along the way. It ensures funds are delivered accurately and consistently, prevents expensive chargeback fees and reduces clerk or system errors and prevents them from showing up on customer credit statements. TransactionVault removes customer credit card data at the point of sale where it would be at risk from hackers. The data is instead stored in Merchant Link's hosted "vault," effectively securing "data at rest" and reducing the cost and effort of attaining and maintaining PCI compliance.

 

The Copper Cellar Corporation utilizes a Squirrel point-of-sale (POS) system for customer payments. Their previous payment processor and data security solution created problems for them by posting batches twice. Merchant Link's full suite of reporting and error detection tools help to eliminate failed batch attempts, duplicate batches or no settlement attempts.

 

"Our old processor had double posted batches before," said Gaston. "Despite not being directly responsible for the error, it made us look bad in the eyes of our guests. Merchant Link monitors for potential batch issues and ensures that problems such as these are a thing of the past for Copper Cellar, its restaurants and its customers."

 

The wide-scale implementation was completed shortly after a pilot site went live successfully with Merchant Link's solutions.