Payment Device Asset Tracking: The Easy Way to Know Exactly Where All Your PIN Pads Are

Question: How many payment devices are you responsible for managing and where are they?

The answer to that question is important for several reasons. First, it’s necessary for compliance. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard 3.2.1 requires providing information about the cardholder data environment, including data flow and the location of all devices and cardholder data repositories. Merchants must scope their cardholder data environment at least annually before the annual assessment for assessor review and retain documentation about how their organization determined that information.

However, retailers also need easy access to the location of payment devices for efficient estate management. For example, when a device operating system reaches its end of life, retailers’ IT teams need to upgrade or replace those devices. For a small retailer, it’s an annoying time-consuming task to check spreadsheets or other documentation device-by-device. For retail enterprises with thousands of stores, each with 10 or more lanes, however, it can blow up employees’ schedules across the organization and force other projects to the back burner.

Another time when visibility into device location is essential is when devices need maintenance and repair. Retailers must keep track of where they are, ticket status, and which devices replaced them from a spares pool to ensure compliance and make the best use of their investments in payment technology.

Then, there’s security. Responsible retailers work with acquirers to implement security solutions and services, like encryption, which replaces human-readable cardholder data with cryptographs. If hackers could find a way into the retailer’s system, there wouldn’t be any monetizable data to steal. But all bets are off if an actor steals a payment device and modifies it to capture cardholder data, often by only allowing swiping the magnetic stripe instead of accepting an EMV chip card or contactless payments. FICO reports that card skimming incidents rose from 1100 to about 1600 from 2022 to 2024. Knowing whether devices are unexpectedly offline can mitigate this risk.

Benefits of a Payment Device Estate Management Solution for Asset Tracking

The best strategy for continuous visibility into payment device locations is to automate asset tracking with a purpose-built estate management solution. When a retailer deploys payment devices, the estate management solution will provision devices as they should be – within a store or across an enterprise – and track the software they’re running. With an estate management solution with asset tracking capabilities, a retailer’s IT team can access that information within minutes rather than spending hours sorting through documentation manually.

A robust estate management solution will also confirm devices are connected to the system and send alerts when that connection is disrupted. If the retailer can’t determine a legitimate reason a device was offline, such as a network interruption, administrators can leverage the solution to prevent the device from reconnecting, mitigating the risk of a modified device on the network.

Retailers also want IP-based device movement as a key component of their estate management. The key functionality large retailers look for are devices that not only report GPS location and are grouped based on store location, but are also grouped in an IP-range. This allows for the device to automatically move into appropriate store-groupings (or other groupings) based on the IP reported by the device.

Automating payment device asset tracking will only become more important in the future. Retailers continue to use traditional payment technology, i.e., countertop PIN pads. However, more are using mobile payment terminals for line-busting and in-aisle assistance. The mobile payment terminal market, valued at about $36 billion in 2022, is growing at an 11% compound annual growth rate, on track to reach more than $82 billion by 2030. Add in “non-traditional” payment devices, like card readers on self-service kiosks and other devices adapted to deliver frictionless payment experiences, and payment device asset tracking becomes even more complex. An estate management solution that allows retailers to track all devices – not only those from specific manufacturers – will streamline device management in the future of payments.

What Can Asset Tracking with a Payment Device Estate Management Solution Do for Your Business?

Although it’s difficult to say what the return on investment from estate management asset tracking capabilities will be across the retail industry, it’s something each organization can calculate for their own operations. Count the number of employees involved in asset tracking, the hours they spend per year, and their hourly wages. Also, factor in the costs of noncompliance and correcting human errors. Weigh this against the cost of the solution, which providers can offer as an easy-to-use and easy-to-maintain solution. It’s likely that retailers, particularly enterprises with hundreds or thousands of stores, will see fast ROI.

Ready to Learn More?

An estate management solution with robust asset tracking capabilities can make life easier and ensure retail organizations comply with PCI requirements. Ingenico offers Manage 360, which tracks terminals with geofencing in addition to keeping them up to date and enabling uploading new terminal features. Contact us to learn more.