An Overview of Secure Credit Card Donation Processing & PCI Compliance

If a company stores credit card numbers in its system, it falls into the strictest level of PCI compliance. That requires annual on-site audits and quarterly network scans, and is very costly. This is regardless of the number of transactions. (The old first drafts of PCI gave different levels depending on quantity of cards processed. That is no longer the case.) So even if you just process 10,000 transactions a year but store credit card numbers, you need to certify against PCI Level 1.