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Jonathan Deveaux, Head of Marketing, Enterprise Data Protection The past few years have opened up exciting growth opportunities for the players in the payments industry. The advent of sophisticated technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, and Machine Learning, alongside a stronger internet penetration, has placed companies in a better position to offer customers incredible payment experiences driven by frictionless and fast transactions. However, the seamless execution of these objectives is easier said than done in the payments landscape. For companies, the first issue lies in the fact that end-customers don’t prefer the painfully long authentication process for executing payments, and it has a negative impact on their experience. The second issue for companies is securing the transaction data and end-users’ personally identifiable information (PII) at all times, without hampering the experience. So, the question is, “how can companies ensure that both the security they provide is effective, and it is not hampering the payment experience.” Enter comforte AG.
Governed by a mission to secure B2B payments and provide frictionless B2C experiences, comforte AG offers an innovative range of payments security solutions that protect the identity of end-users. While adding a layer of security over transaction data, comforte AG enables firms to optimize the processes and leverage analytics to glean meaningful insights. “We have always been passionate about securing data, minimizing risk, and meeting compliance and regulation requirements. Our solutions help organizations protect millions of payment transactions and other sensitive data in business-critical environments without any downtime,” says Jonathan Deveaux, Head of Marketing for Enterprise Data Protection at comforte AG.
Experience Repurposed
The genesis of comforte AG is one of the unique aspects that power the company’s solutions today. “We entered the market with a software that could securely connect users and servers with HP enterprise systems—and it quickly gained a tremendous amount of traction. Our clients then asked us if we could do more with our software. Could we connect other systems with HPE systems while offering the same security? Yes, we could, and we did,” says Deveaux. As the enterprise arena evolved, “data” was titled the new king. It was no more about just securing servers or systems, and there were many new strategies in the market , such as the cloud. comforte AG’s clients wanted to secure data that was shared across these systems and servers.
With a team of industry veterans and a history of helping numerous organizations to secure, connect, modernize, and optimize their systems and core business applications, comforte AG decided to expand further. The next step for comforte AG was not only to connect systems but also to ensure that communication between them is secure. This led them to create solutions that successfully helped many organizations around the globe to run their ATM and point-of-sale networks securely.
What we do is more than just tokenization or securing payments, but protecting identities and ensuring user data privacy as well
With over 20 years of experience in optimizing systems and ensuring its best performance, comforte AG has evolved into a market leader today, serving global customers for both enterprise data protection and empowering mission-critical systems. While one side of the coin is their established brand reputation and expertise, the other side is dominated by their one-of-a-kind solution.
Protecting and Empowering the Payment Ecosystem
Securing credit cards, debit cards, and payment cards are some of comforte AG’s core competencies. Regardless of the number of cards and customer data that resides across networks or servers, the company allows its clients to protect their customers’ PII that they pull in— including user IDs, names, addresses, and even social security numbers or tax IDs. Payment service providers, processors, and outlets can quickly secure their systems using comforte AG’s solutions with zero downtime. “We can bake in our solutions into clients’ systems to implement data security without having to take a service outage on their payments processing. This way, they can quickly protect their transactions and ensure the safety and security of user data in their environment,” explains Deveaux.
comforte AG’s turnkey data security solutions are designed to be implemented on any platform used by clients, whether it is a commercial off-the-shelf payment application or homegrown software. The company utilizes two unique integration methods—transparent integration and smart API—for this purpose. Transparent integration is an intercept type integration that tracks read and write I/O requests and generates random values (tokens) to replace the numbers and details on the card or name. This greatly improves the security of credit cards and e-commerce transactions as the tokens have no value outside the context of a specific transaction or system. comforte AG’s smart APIs, on the other hand, can easily integrate into any application, reducing the development time and effort normally required to integrate security.
With a full R&D team and skilled group of experts dedicated to developing and enhancing data protection methods for its customers, comforte AG is steering far ahead of the market curve. Rather than solely relying on “classic encryption” the firm primarily deploys tokenization to protect data. Unlike encryption that scrambles data with a long string of characters, tokenization is a method that offers a lot more security benefits with less complications.
For the last five years, comforte AG has been a contributing member of the American Standards Committee (ASC), where it helped develop the tokenization standard, ASC X9.119-2. comforte AG’s approach to tokenization was used as a reference in developing the standard. This exemplifies the company’s commitment to ensuring standardization in the financial services industry and its adherence to business compliance.
In one instance, comforte AG helped Bankart—a payments processing center headquartered in Slovenia—to meet PCI and GDPR Data Protection Requirements with zero downtime on their payments processing network. Bankart’s network had many files and databases with cardholder data, all of which had to be protected from both external threats and accidental exposure to unauthorized insiders. Bankart was already employing Volume Level Encryption (VLE) to protect cardholder data; however, VLE was only useful when physical hard drives leave their premises. If a malicious actor infiltrates the system, the data is left in the clear and vulnerable. The client required an additional level of protection so that they can secure the data, even in the event of a breach. Bankart chose SecurDPS from comforte AG—a product suite that provides the tokenization technology to protect any sensitive data with minimal efforts and without changing existing applications. The client was able to implement SecurDPS in their complex IT environment without any changes to source code or system downtime. SecurDPS allowed the organization to take complete control of sensitive data, in accordance with PCI and GDPR requirements. It also lowered their compliance costs and significantly reduced the risk of data breaches. Besides, the scalability of the solution gave the client the ability to expand it enterprise-wide, as and when they need it.
"Our solutions help organizations protect millions of payment transactions and other sensitive data in business-critical environments"
The Go-To Payments Security Partner
With a one-stop solution that helps clients protect payment details, user data, and passwords from increasing cyber breaches, comforte AG aims to boost the flexibility of payment methods in the long run. The company also has plans to tap into the emerging opportunities in quantum computing to further enhance the security of its solutions. “What we do is more than just tokenization or securing payments, but protecting identities and ensuring user data privacy as well,” concludes Deveaux.
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Company
comforte AG
Management
Jonathan Deveaux, Head of Marketing, Enterprise Data Protection
Description
More than 500 Enterprises worldwide rely on comforte to secure the sensitive data that they have been entrusted with. comforte AG is one of the best providers of data-centric security technology. The solutions offered by the company are data protection, data security, tokenization, encryption, PCI DSS, database security, data privacy, data masking, high data security, cloud data security, GDPR, PII, vaultless tokenization, secure data analytics, HPE NonStop, and data-centric security. The company is serving more than five hundred customers around the world. The primary aim of AG San is to empower organizations to secure their growth with leading solutions for enterprise data protection and unlocking value from mission-critical systems
