We announced a Credit Card Data Portability initiative earlier this year to address a serious problem of merchants unexpectedly having stored credit card data held hostage by payment providers.
Our effort recently got a big boost when DataPortability.org, the largest and most well-known data portability group which has received support from major web firms such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Microsoft, recently validated the initiative by accepting Credit Card Data Portability as an active working group. This is the first business-to-business portability effort from the Data Portability group.
We've been satisfied to see that an increasing number of merchants are now making decisions about who to use for payment processing in part based upon whether or not they can get stored credit card back. Payment processors are now starting to feel the heat as more web developers and online merchants are aware of their business practices.
We always figured that adoption by other payment providers would be slow and primarily driven by losing new business and existing customer discontent. To our pleasant surprise, we've been encouraged to see several forward thinking providers follow suit sooner than expected.
To date, DataPortability has dealt primarily with consumer-facing data portability issues. Credit Card Data Portability is the first business-to-business related effort.
They're trying to make data portability policies mainstream for all businesses, just as privacy policies are today.
Join us in our efforts to make credit card data portability the rule instead of the exception.