University of Southern California (USC)

Background

Richard Mariscal is the Merchant Services and PCI manager in the University of Southern California (USC) treasury department. His department manages everything related to credit card processing and PCI. USC has over 50 merchant departments, including a hospital, hotel, bookstore, and more.

What’s it like working with SecurityMetrics?

“It’s been a great partnership during my ten years working with SecurityMetrics. I appreciate the knowledge of the assessors and compliance experts and how they work well with all the departments at USC. If I have questions, I get answers quickly from SecurityMetrics support. I feel more peace of mind partnering with SecurityMetrics because of their extensive background working with universities and their complex environments.”

What compliance challenges has USC faced?

“When I first began at USC, we were responsible for SAQ D– the highest PCI compliance level for the most complex credit card environments. Since then, we’ve moved to P2PE assessments while still having some SAQ C responsibilities. Through collaborative efforts with SecurityMetrics, my team and I have narrowed down our PCI requirements and reduced our risk. SecurityMetrics specifically helped reduce our scope while maintaining a high level of security, simplifying our requirements year after year.”

“I know that PCI version 4.0 is a challenge that everyone who processes credit cards must face, but instead of waiting until the last minute to begin, we have begun working with SecurityMetrics to get a jump start. With a forward-thinking approach, SecurityMetrics and I helped the university implement additional requirements that would be part of PCI version 4.0.”

How were you able to resolve challenges with SecurityMetrics’ help?

“When USC first started tackling PCI compliance, I worked off an Excel spreadsheet and had a very manual process. We then partnered with SecurityMetrics and found that this ended up alleviating a lot of the manual work we were doing, streamlining our processes. Our merchants love that they are able to just upload documents using their project management tool.”

What goals did you achieve by working with SecurityMetrics?

“One of my concerns with the current threat environment is that it felt like we were always reacting to threats instead of proactively attacking them. This partnership has given me the comfort of knowing that someone is thinking proactively about threats for us. This has helped us manage and maintain good security across the university and health system networks.”