.png?width=365&height=122&name=BTLogo%20(1).png)
Who Should Be Outsourcing PCI Compliance
Superheroes are great—on screen or in graphic novels.
Inside a business though, heroic efforts come with a price. And when those heroics revolve around managing PCI compliance, the costs show up not just on the P&L but also as impediments to innovation: Product teams have to work under the shadow of security audits as they develop their roadmaps, and engineering teams carry the burden of sustaining legacy decisions that no one remembers making.
For years, this was simply “how things were done”, and the cost in resources, investment dollars, and constrained product development was considered baked in, but the landscape has changed, and the cost of maintaining this heroic effort is skyrocketing.
As they did during the shift from on-prem infrastructure to the cloud, legacy merchants are experiencing a fundamental modernization moment of truth: Do we still want to own and manage PCI compliance, or is it time to hand off these responsibilities to a third-party?
A decade ago, running your own servers felt responsible, controlled, secure, and mature.
Then, companies realized managing this infrastructure wasn’t creating value; it was just eating up time and effort that could be more valuable elsewhere.
Similarly, managing PCI compliance in-house is emerging as a prime candidate for outsourcing.
Internal Costs of Managing PCI In-House
As with the cloud shift, the moment companies realize the need to offload PCI isn’t random: It happens when a CTO or CISO joins, regulations change, or after a breach or near-miss occurs.
These moments reveal that owning PCI delivers no competitive advantage, just extracts a heavy tax on your team. A typical PCI program will consume:
- 1-2 data security team members.
- 1-2 engineers who rotate throughout the year.
- As-needed support from DevOps, QA, and other internal teams.
What are they doing?
- Audits that take up to six months.
- Security reviews of potential vendors, customers, and partners.
- Internal training on security best practices.
- Somehow, keeping up with core product development and deployment.
That final bullet point is the silent killer. While security shouldn’t have an adversarial relationship with product or engineering, when the product roadmap meeting revolves around “what we can ship without blowing up PCI,” things can get a little tense.
What causes a merchant to outsource PCI responsibilities?
Eventually, every organization hits a point where the internal costs of PCI become impossible to ignore. Companies will often offload PCI when one or more of these happen internally:
- A new head of security joins.
- A product initiative is blocked by PCI.
- A PSP contract expires.
- Reliability requirements increase.
- New regional compliance requirements are imposed.
PCI isn’t the problem: PCI ownership is.
Where is that data going?
Storing raw cardholder data, even with strong controls, puts a target on your back.
Access permission management mistakes, audit gaps, misconfigurations, cloud drift…any one of these can create exposure with long-term consequences.
And for what? None of these risks are revenue-generating.
Even though you remain in compliance, staying competitive introduces a new challenge entirely: data quality.
Historically, six-digit BINs (Bank Identification Numbers) were enough for reliable identification. Today, BINs have grown to eight and even ten digits. Overlaps are occurring more frequently, and fuzzy matches are increasing.
Payment Service Providers (PSPs) often don’t expose the full data set, or provide real transparency into it, and the only way to be certain your transactions will be honored is to use the full PAN (Primary Account Number.)
Doing so, however, requires moving your payment systems into PCI scope, which most merchants cannot and should not do, given the cost in time and investment dollars.
This creates a turning point for merchants who want accurate routing, improved authorization rates, fraud modeling, and payment optimization, but not the PCI scope.
And this is where a third-party token vault makes all the difference.
What Merchants Get Instead
Using a third-party vault can eliminate as much as 90% of PCI compliance requirements—much more than just audit relief. This isn’t outsourcing, it’s upgrading your capabilities.
- Multi-Processor Flexibility: Bring your own PSP, test new PSPs, and add and remove as many as necessary to meet demand and margin needs.
- Network-Level Capabilities: Network tokens, account updater services, and metadata directly from the card networks can be accessed without falling afoul of PCI rules.
- Product Velocity: Ship new features faster without engineers having to play superhero to satisfy PCI scope and the needs of legacy systems.
The vault becomes the reliability anchor for the entire payment stack.
With that foundation in place, the biggest platforms in the world—be it a global merchant, VSaaS platform, or a subscription platform—don’t have to rely on a single PSP or tie themselves to a specific processor’s infrastructure. You get direct-to-network capabilities without storing raw card data within your own systems, yet enjoy reliability and flexibility that processors can’t match, while reducing your PCI burden by as much as 90%.
PCI will always exist, but it doesn’t need to live within your systems. Retiring the PCI capelets you reclaim your roadmap and give engineering teams the freedom to get back to building again.
Start spending more time on revenue-generating activities, not audits. Talk with our team to get started.
