Stripe Teams with Twilio Making it Easier for Small Businesses to Take Payments Over the Phone

Stripe, an online payment processing service, and Twilio, a cloud communications platform, have announced a partnership they say will make it easier for small businesses to take payments over the phone. That partnership has taken the form of new payment service from Twilio called <Pay>.

The new service will not only help businesses integrate phone payments, it will also include security protocols to ensure PCI compliance, the companies say. This is particularly important for small businesses as they continue to increase their mobile presence.

If a small business owner is not able to meet the PCI standards, credit card companies will not allow their cards to be used. This in turn greatly limits the earning capability of the business.

What is PCI?

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) was launched in 2006 to improve payment account security throughout the transaction process.

The PCI DSS is a standard which ensures any company which accepts, processes, stores and transmits credit card information maintains a secure environment. And it applies to any organization, no matter how big or small or the number of transactions it carries out.

Twilio <Pay>

Phone payments are essential for any business, but for industries such as food and retail, they are especially important. And with mobile phones now in the hands of virtually ever person, businesses need to make payment on these devices seamless for their customers.

Twilio <Pay> eliminates the exposure to security and compliance risks as well as the complexities businesses face with phone payments. By ensuring the flow is secure and PCI compliant, businesses can accept payments from the millions of people on mobile phones.

When a customer orders over the phone, the Twilio <Pay> can be activated by the employee so it can start accepting the payment information. At this time, Twilio will automatically prompt the customer to input their card number, expiration date, postal code, and security code.

The customer uses the keypad to enter their payment info, but the employee can’t see or hear the details via dual tone – multi-frequency. This is the tone generated when you press the buttons on your phone.

A dual tone – multi-frequency redaction feature prevents employees from listening and figuring out the numbers and other information the customer is entering into the prompt.

Once the customer enters the information, Stripe’s technology generates a token so your company can charge the card. Best of all, only one token is generated for each transaction and the sensitive data never hits your servers. This ensures your compliance with PCI and it is one less thing you have to worry about when it comes to protecting customer information.

Currently, nine major credit cards are supported under the new solution with a fee of $0.010 for a successful <Pay> transaction or tokenization.

Image: Twilio

This article, "Stripe Teams with Twilio Making it Easier for Small Businesses to Take Payments Over the Phone" was first published on Small Business Trends