Heartland Payment Systems, OpenBook to Offer Lodging Data Security Solution

Heartland Payment Systems and OpenBook, a division of Yellowstone Hotel Systems, plan on delivering secure payments to the hotel and lodging industry by integrating Heartland's E3 end-to-end encryption solution with OpenBook's property management software. Heartland is one of the nation's largest payments processors and the American Hotel & Lodging Association's official preferred provider of card processing, check management, payroll and tip management services. This integrated offering is expected to enable hotels using OpenBook software to protect sensitive cardholder and payment account information with E3.

With an E3 terminal or wedge, data is instantly encrypted the moment a card is swiped. E3 is designed to offer full lifecycle protection, not merely point-to-point like most competing solutions, and render payment data useless in the event of a compromise.

E3 is expected to be widely available in the second quarter of this year. This joint offering is scheduled to be available in advance of Visa's mandated security regulations that require merchants to use a Payment Card Industry (PCI)-compliant payment application by July 1, 2010. Every business that accepts credit, debit, and/or prepaid card payments, and stores, processes or transmits payment card data, must meet the PCI Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). This means merchants cannot use an application that stores prohibited data elements, such as magnetic strip or PIN data.

E3 is intended to satisfy Visa's mandate and reduce the costs of PCI compliance as well as the risks of being non-compliant. Non-compliant lodging establishments may face penalties and costly fines that can range in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. E3 is designed to have a tamper-resistant POS terminal, magnetic stripe reader/wedge and other devices and software tools that will never store cardholder data on a business' system, which is expected to relieve the business of PCI card data liability. In the unlikely case of a data breach for a merchant properly using E3, Heartland will reimburse breach-related fines.