Comodo Case Study of Merchant-Accounts.ca Demonstrates Market Demand For PCI

Case Study Provides Clear Evidence of the Need to Deliver PCI Compliancy Solutions Aimed at the SME Segment

Jersey City, NJ March 05, 2008 - Comodo, a global Certification Authority and leading provider of Identity and Trust Assurance Management solutions today has announced a new case study recently published on Merchant-Accounts.ca, an innovative Canadian merchant account service provider. The case study outlines the Merchant-Account.ca reseller experience with providing its customers Comodo PCI compliant scanning and the impacts to its business. Key benefits outlined by Merchant-Accounts.ca in this case study are higher customer satisfaction, ease of PCI scanning compliancy for customers, better technical support in PCI scanning related customer issues.

Merchant-Accounts.ca delivers merchant accounts and credit card processing solutions for small and mid-sized Canadian businesses. Merchant-Accounts' added Comodo PCI scanning in 2007 in combination with Comodo's advanced suite of security and anti-hacker solutions. With these services, Merchant-Accounts.ca customers have been able to achieve improved website security, prevent attacks from hackers, and maintain PCI compliance.
Case Study Highlights
The problem:

PCI compliance is a technically complex, new security standard for online retailers. As a leading service provider to online retailers, Merchant-Accounts.ca needed to deliver an easy to understand PCI compliancy solution for its customers that included mission critical PCI scanning. The solution needed to be viable in terms of cost and technical support for small to mid-sized Canadian businesses that may not have a large budget or a dedicated technical staff. As important, Merchant-Accounts wanted to reduce the risk that customers would migrate to other service providers looking for a PCI compliant scanning provider.
The solution:

Before partnering with Comodo, Merchant-Accounts.ca opted for giving their clients the Approved Scanning Vendor list provided by Visa and MasterCard. However, this proved to be an inadequate approach since customers were tasked with spending a great deal of time sorting through diverse price and service offers. The result was that Merchant-Accounts.ca customers were left unsupported with a slew of options to research. Worse still, in situations when a merchant ran into a problem, customers would "get stuck" in a back-and-forth situation between the PCI security vendor and the payment gateway.

Comodo and its HackerGuardian PCI Scanning Compliancy solution was selected because Comodo:

* Was an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV)
* Had a simple to understand and deployable solution
* Had cost effective solutions that are well within the budget of the typical small business
* Offered a comprehensive suite of security tools which provide effective security, scanning and PCI compliance solutions through an easy to use, intuitive interface
* Delivered excellent customer service

Business Results:

The partnership with COMODO has improved productivity for Merchant-Accounts.ca as follows:

* Reduced customer care costs.
Because Merchant-Accounts can defer to COMODO on PCI compliance issues, this reduces overall costs of staff resources needed to support technical and potentially complex security issues.
* Improved Customer Satisfaction.
Inbound calls regarding PCI related questions were reduced by 90%, thus eliminating one of the most difficult customer care issues for Merchant-Accounts.ca.
* Increased Revenue Per Transaction.
Where Merchant-Accounts.ca used to incur customer care costs from supporting PCI compliance inquiries, this has turned into a source of revenue by reselling the Comodo PCI Compliance solutions.
* PCI compliancy of customers is achieved twice as quickly.
Merchants are completing the process and going live with credit card processing more than twice as quickly when compared to the amount of time the average merchant took to achieve compliance before the Comodo PCI solution was offered.

"PCI compliance has been a struggle for many etailers, particularly smaller ones, because it is a complex security standard that must be adhered to by all merchants that transmit or store sensitive cardholder data," commented David Goodale, CEO of Merchant-Accounts.ca. "In working with Comodo, we have found that our customers are better serviced with solutions that meet the needs of small and mid-sized Canadian businesses. We have seen increased customer satisfaction in regards to PCI issues since Comodo delivers the best of all worlds; cost effective solutions that are easy to use within an infrastructure that allows to provide world-class service to our customers."

The Comodo HackerGuardian Service Bundle includes; a) PCI compliancy which delivers the required scanning to meet the stringent standards on how e-merchants store customer data and b) vulnerability management to ensure that servers are free from hackers. At $79, Comodo's bundle costs a fraction of the leading competitor's solution, which can run more than $1000.

For more information, please visit: www.hackerguardian.com
About Merchant-Accounts.ca

Merchant-Accounts.ca specializes in providing merchant accounts and credit card processing services to Canadian and international merchants. With a customer centric focus, Merchant-Accounts.ca provides a dedicated support representative to provide ongoing support to each merchant through every step of building, launching and marketing an e-commerce website. By taking the time to work closely with each individual business owner, merchants are better able to receive the highest level of customer service, get the lowest rate possible, and develop a highly effective website which will realize the full potential of their e-commerce business. For more information, please visit: www.merchant-accounts.ca
About Comodo

Comodo, through its group of Internet security companies, is a leading Certification Authority and global provider of Identity and Trust Assurance services on the Internet. Comodo secures and authenticates online transactions and communications for over 2,000,000 businesses and consumers.

With a global presence Comodo offers businesses and consumers third-generation solutions for intelligent security and authentication technologies that create trust online. Comodo's technological expertise includes PKI digital certification, Code signing certification, integrated authentication infrastructure services, Web Content authentication, Secure messaging solutions, PCI compliancy scanning, SSL digital certificates including our flagship InstantSSL brand, HackerGuardian, Banking solutions including Two Factor Authentication, and digital e-commerce services.

For additional information on Comodo - Creating Trust Online™ visit http://www.comodo.com

For more information, reporters and analysts may contact:
Judy Shapiro
Comodo
+1 (201) 963-9471
Email: judy.shapiro@comodo.com

COMODO Solutions
525 Washington Blvd
Jersey City, 07310
USA

Comodo, through its group of Internet security companies, is a leading Certification Authority and global provider of Identity and Trust Assurance services on the Internet. Comodo secures and authenticates online transactions and communications for over 2,000,000 businesses and consumers.

This release was published on openPR.