How the safest mobile payment app came to life
With an ever-growing family of engineers at its heart, MagTek was founded in 1972 with the vision of solving complex business problems for today’s world through advanced innovation, dedicated integrity, and spirited leadership. Today that vision thrives in the work of hundreds of employees across the globe.
The story of QwickPAY begins with merchants at the point-of-sale and MagTek card readers. When it came to building the best hardware for merchants to accept credit cards, the big question facing us was: How do I protect my customers’ credit card data safely, while keeping the fraudsters’ counterfeit cards out at the point-of-sale?
To keep a cardholder’s payment data truly secure from theft, the account number has to be encrypted as soon as the card is swiped, before any data is transmitted. And the mathematical algorithm used to encrypt that data has to be reliable and proven. In order to detect fraudulent cards, we had to look beyond just the account number; we needed to capture the unique and unclonable magnetic fingerprint (or MagnePrint) on each and every magstripe card.
So we got to work and built a suite of secure card readers that encompass all of the above requirements using a powerful, open-standards-based encryption, a dynamic key management system for that algorithm (DUKPT or Derived Unique Key Per Transaction), and access to the Global MagnePrint Exchange, the largest authentic card information database in the world.
We then set out to develop a combined mobile and desktop application with a variety of secure card reading and authenticating devices to provide merchants with a payment system that can be used almost anywhere, anytime. As a company, we aim to provide the best solution at the lowest cost. When it comes to mobile payments, QwickPAY is our answer to every merchant’s business needs.