PCI DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. It is a set of security requirements created by the major card networks — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and JCB — and administered by the PCI Security Standards Council. Any organisation that stores, processes, or transmits credit card information must comply with PCI DSS, regardless of its size or transaction volume. The standard exists to protect cardholder data from breaches and fraud, and non-compliance can result in heavy fines, increased processing fees, or the loss of the ability to accept card payments altogether.
The standard is organised into twelve core requirements spanning areas such as network security, access control, encryption, vulnerability management, and monitoring. These requirements are not optional suggestions — they are enforced through regular assessments, and the rigour of those assessments scales with the volume of transactions a company handles. Organisations processing the highest volumes must undergo an annual on-site audit by a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA), while smaller merchants may self-assess using standardised questionnaires.
For platforms and SaaS companies that embed payments into their products, PCI DSS compliance is one of the most significant technical and operational hurdles. Every component that touches cardholder data — from the checkout form to the backend server that routes the transaction — falls within PCI scope. This is why many businesses choose to offload as much of that burden as possible to a certified payments infrastructure partner rather than building and maintaining compliance in-house.
Shuttle Global is PCI DSS Level 1 certified, the highest tier of compliance. This means platforms that integrate Shuttle’s Embedded Payments, Voice Checkout, or Payment Links inherit that certification rather than shouldering the full compliance burden themselves. With Voice Checkout, for example, Shuttle uses DTMF masking so that card numbers spoken or keyed over the phone never reach the platform’s contact centre environment — keeping the platform out of PCI scope entirely. By handling tokenization, secure data routing, and PSP connectivity within its own certified infrastructure, Shuttle lets its customers focus on their core product while knowing the payments layer meets the industry’s strictest security standard.