The Atlanta-based company, which processes payment card transactions for thousands of merchants, first reported the compromise Friday when it saying that intruders had gained access to a portion of its processing system. It later updated the statement to say that data belonging to about 1.5 million cardholders, had been "exported" from its systems.

The company's disclosures came after the on Friday identified Global Payments as the victim of a major data breach. The breach was by blogger Brian Krebs. Krebs' report did not name Global Payments and was based on an internal alert from Visa and MasterCard warning card-issuing banks about a breach at an undisclosed payment processor involving about 10 million debit and credit cards.

In a conference call with investors, Global Payments Chairman and CEO Paul Garcia said the data theft was confined to the company's North American processing system. The breach did not involve any merchant systems or systems belonging to sales partners, he said.

"Neither merchant systems, nor point-of-sale devices were involved in any way," Garcia said, according to a of Monday's call.

"Importantly, investigation to-date has revealed that the theft involved Track 2 card data only. We do not believe, Track 1 card data was taken or that cardholder names, addresses, Social Security numbers for consumer banking information was obtained by the criminals," Garcia said repeating the company's earlier statement on the breach. Based on an investigation of the intrusion, "we believe that this incident is contained," he said.