Payments management company Litle & Co of Lowell, Massachusetts, USA won a Stevie® Award for Best New IVR or Web Service Solution in the new product awards categories of the 2011 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Ben Saren, their VP of Marketing, will Chair the committee for final judging of the New Product & Service categories in the 2012 edition of the awards, which is accepting entries through January 18 (get your entry kit here).
As online credit card transactions increase, so do the risks. We look at how Litle & Co. is reducing these risks.
Industry statistics in the United States suggest that there were more than 900 data breaches involving more than 900 million credit card records in 2009 alone, yet the majority of merchants still keep customers’ credit card numbers on file.
Meanwhile, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards for data security are still evolving as they relate to Data Loss Protection (DLP) technologies.
Ahead of the Competition
Litle & Co. has developed a forward-looking solution that protects consumer data. The company believes that tokenization is the next step in enabling safe removal of sensitive cardholder data from merchant systems. The company is ahead of other solution vendors in proactively addressing vulnerabilities in the payment chain of card transactions in order to protect merchants and, ultimately, consumers.
“We believe that best practice approaches in business-to-business customer service should include those in which the design, goal, and benefit is focused not just on the customer, but also on the customer’s customer,” said Jason Pavona, Executive Vice President, Product Management at Litle & Co. “Our product vision is simple: Build, develop, and implement solutions that help our customers create more secure, more enduring, and more profitable relationships with their customers.”
The Litle Vault, introduced in September 2010, is a web-driven, platform-integrated, tokenization solution that enables card-not-present (CNP) merchants to safely remove sensitive cardholder data from their systems without disrupting any existing card transaction-based process. The service is delivered directly to Litle’s customers, and therefore to their customers, through the Litle payment-processing platform.
Tokens replace credit card numbers for all payment transactions including
authorizations, deposits, and chargebacks.
Handling the Customers’ Data
Litle Vault removes merchants’ data security encumbrances so they can focus on selling. Instead, the onus of handling most of the data management is moved to Litle & Co, so the merchants’ customers’ card data exists only on an offsite server that specializes in handling payment data.
The Vault makes electronic commerce more efficient, safe, and profitable by:
• Reducing the scope of PCI Compliance
Whenever sensitive cardholder data is replaced with a token and used in association with operational areas such as acceptance of online payments, cardholder data storage, and chargeback processing, it can reduce the scope of PCI audits and associated costs by as much as 60%.
• Minimizing the risk from potential data breaches
Data breaches do and will happen. However, with the Vault, hackers cannot steal what merchants don’t have: the customer’s credit card information. In the event tokens are compromised, cyber-thieves will quickly find that the tokens are completely worthless to them.
• Centralizing credit card security and reducing data exposure
Once registered, a single token can be used by anyone in an organization, mitigating the time-consuming and often costly process of having to encrypt, decrypt, and re-encrypt information each time someone touches a customer’s credit card.
• Eliminating insurance costs
Tokenization is a preventive measure that minimizes the cost of a data breach risk. It also potentially enables a merchant to eliminate certain onerous insurance premiums that can often run to hundreds of thousands of dollars. With tokenization, a component of the Errors and Omissions (E&O) Liability Insurance premium cost—typically $0.60 per card annually—can be eliminated.
Industry Endorsement
“Tokenization of payment card data has quickly become a must-have for e-commerce and direct-response merchants whose web presence exposes them to a great deal of breach risk and who are seeking to reduce their PCI scope,” said David Fish, Senior Analyst at Mercator Advisory Group, the leading research and consulting firm focused on the payments industry. “Litle & Co. has earned the reputation of a trusted partner in the card-not-present space, where their expertise in dealing with transaction data security in card processing environments has coalesced in … Litle Vault."
About Jason Pavone
Jason brings more than 15 years of product development, direct marketing, sales, and entrepreneurial experience to Litle & Co. Jason leads Litle’s Sales & Marketing strategy, which includes business development and sales; product strategy and development; brand awareness marketing and communications; and partner communities and initiatives. Before joining Litle, Jason served as a Partner of Enflect, LLC, which developed several product companies in the payment, loyalty, financial services, and software industries. Prior to Enflect, Jason developed Wallaware, Inc., a wireless router company, where he drove the company’s first U.S and International sales, raised several rounds of private equity capital, and opened operations in the US and internationally. Before Wallaware, Jason was Director of Wireless and Personalization at Terra Lycos, a top-three most-visited Internet destination. At Terra Lycos he created some of the first wireless portal solutions, available in 30 countries under the brand Lycos Anywhere®. He also managed Terra Lycos’s Network Personalization products, including MyLycos®, the award-winning personalization destination with 20 million registered users. Before Terra Lycos, Jason was instrumental in building INPHO, Inc. (including domania.com, which today is part of IAC’s LendingTree), a pioneer in the Internet real estate space. Jason received a bachelor’s degree in Finance and Entrepreneurial Studies from Babson College.
About Litle
Litle & Co. is the payment-processing engine behind leading ecommerce and consumer-direct digital brands including Overstock.com, Ancestry.com, Gilt Groupe, CSN Stores, and Guthy-Renker. Founded in 2001, the company’s customer-obsessed culture is committed to Voice of the Customer initiatives, including Net Promoter Score (NPS). Litle & Co won the 2010 Stevie® Award for eCommerce Customer Service and the 2011 Stevie® Award for product and service innovation for its tokenization solution Litle Vault. To learn more about Litle & Co. visit http://www.litle.com, or call 1-800-548-5326 (1-800-LITLECO) or 978-275-6500.
In February 2010, when Jennifer Spencer went to Washington D.C. to visit her daughter, Jean, it was extremely cold and the streets were lined with dirty snow. Jean, who was working as an intern for the Wall Street Journal, was using an iPhone to keep in touch with her office. While walking along the street, Jean told her mother: “Mom, I am missing calls from my Editor. When my phone rings, I have to find my phone in my bag, pull off my gloves with my teeth, and then shove them in my pocket in order to take the call.” She added: “You have to invent gloves that work on touch screens!”
With this year's 