Edward Lodens, Visa's head of third-party assurance, said the take up since its launch in August has been good with "a lot of merchants" joining the program.

"It breaks down barriers to security [which] can be seen as a large cost to business," Lodens, who did not reveal the exact number of participants, said. "They can take best practice and validate their compliance."

According to Visa, the free service, which uses a U.S. vendor but is available across the Asia-Pacific, will be provided "indefinitely" at this point to all merchants that accept Visa cards for payment of goods and services.

Lodens said Visa's main message, that merchants and third-party processors should not be storing card information, remains unchanged.

"If there is a need for that, then [merchants] need to protect the information," he said, adding that card-holder data should not be stored. "Where we see incidents of compromise is because merchants are unnecessarily storing information."