Compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard remains an elusive goal for many merchants and other organizations that handle general-purpose payment card data. In fact, compliance fell in 2018 for the second year in a row, according to Verizon Communications Inc.
Verizon’s newly released Payment Security Report says only 36.7% of organizations reviewed for its annual global study were fully compliant with the PCI DSS in 2018, down nearly 16 percentage points from 2017, which in turn was down slightly from the peak of 55.4% in 2016. The 2018 global compliance rate is the lowest since 2013, when it was just 20%.