African integrated payments firm Interswitch Transnational says it has been awarded for a third year in a row the ‘Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard’ (PCIDSS), this highest global security certification.

PCIDSS is the globally accepted set of policies and procedures intended to optimise the security of credit, debit and prepaid card transactions and protect cardholders against misuse of their personal information.

Meanwhile, Interswitch says it is the only company in West Africa to have achieved PCIDSS and is using its experience to assist its partner banks to also achieve PCIDSS.

The award of PCIDSS is carried out independently by an external qualified security assessor (QSA) and by an approved scanning vendor (ASV) who test for vulnerability.

“At Interswitch we are committed to maintaining the highest standards of security for our customers and are continually looking for ways to strengthen our fraud management strategy. So successful have we been that our transaction to fraud ratio is now less than 0.1%,” says Mitchell Elegbe, group managing director and chief executive officer, Interswitch Transnational.

The transaction to fraud ratio is the number of transactions divided by the number that are fraudulent expressed as a percentage.

The global best practice average for the fraud to transaction ratio is between 1 – 3.99%, says Interswitch.