In a sign that the overall payments industry attitude toward encryption and card data security might be changing, Heartland executives told analysts and reporters that the company saw a competitive advantage in developing end to end encryption.
Speaking on a conference call about the company's first quarter earnings and future prospects Heartland CEO Robert Carr answered an analyst's question that the company sees improved encryption as a way to differentiate itself in the market.
"The answer is yes, we do think it's a competitive advantage," Carr said. "We're doing TRS and encryption which is a hardware encryption right at the point of data entry through the mag stripe into the system. We think that will be a point of differentiation and many, many merchants want to be out of having card numbers going through their POS systems and there's a lot of interest in it in the marketplace."
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Heartland CFO, Robert Baldwin, also on the call reinforced the point as well.
"And I would say just to add that we're not looking at this as a way to, out in the small and mid sized merchant community, it will be a differentiator, it will I think allow us to be discussing the multiple advantage of working with Heartland including our three year contract where we don't change pricing and full disclosure and other attributes," Baldwin said. "We're not looking at this, we're not expecting a small to mid sized merchant to pay more for this except for the incremental cost of the hardware necessary to adopt the system."
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