Standards to protect PINs at the point of sale (POS), for example, have been in place for a number of years, but it is equally important to protect other types of cardholder data such as the primary account number (PAN) across the entire transaction process.

There are three main initiatives underway today that apply to the protection of this data and aim to improve overall payment card security at the POS, between the POS and the acquiring bank and beyond.

While the POS security standard landscape may seem complicated, when these various initiatives are broken down and analyzed, commonalities can be identified. What's more, the implementation of single security technologies, such as end-to-end encryption or tokenization, can support compliance across all three initiatives.

Given the complexity of the payment security standards environment, combined with the practical requirement to comply, greater clarification is needed to ensure that POS vendors, retailers/merchants and financial services organizations understand how each of these initiatives relate to one another and ultimately how they can help keep sensitive information safe. So, let's look at these three different items in some more detail.