Eckoh, a provider of customer service solutions using speech recognition, and complementary services on the Web and mobile, has successfully maintained its status as a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Level One Service Provider by continuing to meet the comprehensive set of security requirements designed to protect cardholder information.

Eckoh first achieved PCI DSS accreditation status in October 2010 following a three-year process. By maintaining compliance, Eckoh reinforces its ability to provide secure services to its clients and that cardholder information is protected as payments are processed in a fully compliant manner.

Eckoh continuously reviews its infrastructure, security policies and procedures, software, and access controls, to satisfy the compliance criteria. Eckoh had a full and detailed external audit by a qualified security assessor, who tested and confirmed compliance with all the requirements.

EckohPAY, the company's real-time secure phone, Web, SMS, and smartphone payments product, stops card data being handled by contact center agents, therefore, significantly reducing the amount of data at risk of compromise.

Dave Holliday, head of operations and IT of Eckoh, says, "Understanding and implementing the requirements can seem daunting, especially for organizations without the internal resources. This shouldn't be a reason to ignore the standard as PCI requirements represent security practices that most businesses would want to adopt. Eckoh is committed to safeguarding valuable data and allowing our clients to operate more securely. By maintaining our PCI compliant status, we can help take some of the strain off of our clients and help them to descope PCI DSS."

Edward Casteloes, a security consultant with the Professional Services (EMEA) unit of Verizon Business, comments, "We have worked with Eckoh on their compliance program over a number of years, and not only has Eckoh achieved Level 1 accreditation for a second year, they have embraced the intent of the standard in all aspects of their business, which makes the audit process extremely smooth for us as their QSA. With no remediation activity demonstrates that the business processes required to continually deliver secure payment services are now part and parcel of the ethos of Eckoh and that they have matured beyond the initial compliance program. Becoming a participating organization with the Security Standards Council validates Eckoh's commitment to achieving and delivering industry-leading payment solutions, and we look forward to working with them over the coming years."

Enquiries:

Eckoh
Nik Philpot, CEO
Adam Moloney, group finance director
www.eckoh.com       
Tel: 01442 458 300

Buchanan
Jeremy Garcia, Nicola Cronk, Gabriella Clinkard
Tel: 020 7466 5000

About Eckoh
Eckoh is the U.K.'s leading provider of customer service solutions using speech recognition, and complementary services on the web and mobile. Its solutions enable transactions, enquiries, or payments to be processed without the caller needing to talk to a contact center agent. This significantly reduces its clients' costs, while freeing up contact center agents to deal with more complex enquiries. Eckoh is the largest provider of such hosted services in the UK.

Eckoh's secure and resilient infrastructure has the scalability to handle more than 650,000 calls an hour and up to 8,000 calls simultaneously, which means calls can always be answered no matter how unpredictable the circumstances.

For more information, visit: www.eckoh.com