IP Payments Australia director, Mark Lewis, told Computerworld Australia that he found the lack of awareness in the financial world surprising.

"In the successful PCI implementations that we've seen, at the end of the process the CFOs and the finance people are well and truly across compliance," he said.

According to Lewis, this is because after going through PCI compliance procedures, company executives learn that it is "not just an IT problem" and it is unfair to burden the IT department with compliance implementation.

"There is a large part of the PCI standards which relate to securing systems and infrastructure but there are a lot of other policies and processes related to human resources which will need to be engaged in a PCI way if they are handling credit card data," Lewis said.

Turning to education, he said the general marketing of PCI compliance is slowly changing.