Online Payments – Tips for SME Industry

As one of the players in SME industry, the power of internet nowadays gives you the opportunity to compete with other SME companies. It’s not a big deal for you (SME) to play around with bigger retailer since you have positioned your unique products or services into the markets.

Eventhough we can see the advantages of having internet, you must know there are also disadvantages of having internet in your company. One of the disadvantages is, getting trust issues from the customer. Basically, you have to keep your client’s information safe with your company. So they will not feel insecure when dealing with you.

In addition, some researches stated that, in 2011 $3.4 Billion total of online fraud was recorded and it will increase up to $6.4 Billion by 2018. Due to not seeing you directly, your online customers will have the tendency to be afraid to use your service and having a mistrust regarding their personal information with your company.

So as a entrepreneur in SME industry, you need to gain trust from everyone especially your customers. You should find the solution and keep existing in the industry to beat other companies and industries.

6 Amazing Security Tips for SME

1. Know your current schemes and weaknesses

Even though it takes time to learn and know about the types of fraud exist in the industry, it will be great and worth it all. This is because you have always been the target (victims), and you should know why they are so attracted to you, how it is done and how it can be stopped.

As an owner of a small business, you should know all this things and if you have no idea what and how does it happen, you should go or hire your employee to go to the training provided. The more you know regarding this problem, the more you are able to detect any suspicious activities and transactions.

If you have the sufficient knowledge to handle this issue, you can stop all the transactions before getting into a bigger trouble. The most important thing is, you need to keep learning because this criminal will keep increasing and attacking faster than what you can expect.

2. Become PCI-DSS compliant

This regulation was created by Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. The purpose is to help standardize the process of processing, transmitting and storing payment data. These are quite complicated, but they provide beneficial assistance in stopping fraud.

3. Set your equipment with more protection

As a small business, you might leave your laptop, computer, tablet and other things in order to complete the process of order and payments. However, you are putting your business at risk especially when you start adding employees.

You want your device to be password protected, so don’t let anyone get the access to your device. It’s good if you can change your password by using combination of number and letters. In fact, educate your employees that they need to protect their own devices.

4. Don’t hang onto customer details

As a businessman, don’t store any type of payment and credit card details on a database, network or storage systems.

It will expose your weakness and it will be easy for other people to get to know your company and customer details. The best way is, just get rid of the data as soon as the transaction is made.

5. Add more steps to the transaction verification process

Basically, the idea is to verify the details several times to make sure that all data are true and can be used.

For example, check either the address verification matches with billing and shipping address or not, the security card number (CVV) and etc. You can hire employee to identify how many people entered wrong personal details and automatically stop their transaction if more than three or four times.

6. Report suspicious activities

The best thing that you can do is to share the suspicious activity with Internet Crime Complaint Center and FBI, if needed. It also will avoid from data breach from your company.

On other words, it will be more secured than before. Unconsciously, you will helps other companies to be more alert and careful in running business because you share your information with them regarding the suspicious activities.

Guidelines on protecting from Cyber-attacks

Cyber-attacks are nothing new in this world. They can do this activity by exploiting weakness in computer code, networked devices and other technology driven systems. It is very dangerous!

As an SME player, you should take this point to avoid from becoming a victim of cyber-attacks. Here are some of the tips:

Use anti-virus protection

• Install latest updates and patches
• Limit your employee on a “need to know” basis
• Use a strong password and change them frequently
• Steps to recover from a Data Breach

Once your data were breached, it will affect your company’s image. People will not trust your company anymore and will eventually stop using your services. So here are some of the steps to recover from a data breach:

Step 1 – Alert everyone (customer, payment processors, banks, employees and credit bureaus) as soon as possible regarding the data.

Step 2 – Change all passwords and restricting employee access on a need-to-know basis. It might be late to stop the damage,but there is no reason for you to leave your weaknesses exposed.

Step 3 – Bring in a security expert to measure the full extent of the damage, which involve all affected devices, systems and networks.

Step 4 – Start rebuilding. And then, problems solved!

You should be prepared to cover the damage and be more specific on the planning process. Moreover, you need to avoid data breach issues to happen again in the future. So that you can manage your company again.