If you’ve ever tried to bolt a secure payment flow onto a contact center, you already know the pain of long vendor onboarding cycles, heavy compliance requirements, voice rerouting, provisioning phone numbers and months of waiting before anyone can even test anything.
Add to that the complexity of meeting Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) standards, and it can feel overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
SequenceShift takes what is normally a slow, expensive, compliance-laden task and turns it into something you can set up yourself quickly, cleanly and without involving a sales team or a weeks-long proof of concept.
The process is simple by design. “We’re disrupting the PCI compliance market for the contact center,” said Dan Bloy, Regional Director at SequenceShift.
Self-Service Deployment Made Easy
From day one, SequenceShift built its product to fit naturally into Amazon Connect to secure payments. There’s no voice rerouting through third parties to worry about, no special telco configuration and no waiting around for someone to provision infrastructure. It simply plugs in and you’re ready to take customer payment details over the phone.
SequenceShift’s solution integrates with Amazon Connect via API, which allows it to be deployed in under an hour.” As Dmitri Muntean, Managing Director, at SequenceShift, put it:
“From our side, it’s pure SaaS. We don’t see a phone call; we don’t see the voice traffic. We don’t need to issue phone numbers or anything like that. That’s unlike our competitors, where they have to route the actual voice call through their system one way or another, which is usually at least four to six weeks of setup time, just to get started.”
Vendors tend to charge for this setup, which is another differentiator. “We don’t charge for proof of concept, so customers can just go in and set up everything by themselves,” Muntean said.
SequenceShift is designed to be fast and straightforward so that teams can get hands-on in taking secure IVR payments without the usual friction.
“The product was originally designed as something we would like to use ourselves. Because a lot of times, you would like to evaluate the product without talking to a salesperson or committing to anything,” Muntean said.
This focus on simplicity and self-service means you can quickly see the platform’s capabilities firsthand. You can set up a fully compliant phone payment flow for a PCI-DSS contact center in Amazon Connect in just four steps.
Building a Compliant Payment Flow
Step 1: Sign Up Through AWS Marketplace
What SequenceShift offers is essentially compliance-as-a-service. As a new customer, you sign yourself up through the Amazon Marketplace. This gives you access to advanced integration documentation.
Step 2: Create the Integration
You can use SequenceShift’s documentation and management portal to set up your phone integration. If you want to push payment results into a CRM, SequenceShift covers that too.
The more tech-savvy teams can get up and running immediately. “They can get everything running within a day. If their project plan is two weeks, they’ll get it running in two weeks,” Muntean said.
Step 3: Configure Amazon Connect
From there, you wire the service into your contact flows inside Amazon Connect.
Because the platform is API-based, customers never touch the voice layer at all; they simply integrate the service into their existing IVR payment or agent flows.
Step 4: Go Live Without Touching Compliance
Going live is the part that customers often underestimate. The second you handle payment card data yourself, you take on the responsibility of complying with PCI DSS rules, and that is a hefty load.
SequenceShift takes nearly all of it off your back.
Payments stay within the Amazon Connect call flow, avoiding third-party telco delays and reducing call times. And to reduce the risk associated with phone payment compliance in handling customer payment details, SequenceShift only holds card data temporarily, Muntean said.
“It is encrypted and stored in memory only while the card data is in our environment… for the period of transaction. So as soon as the transaction is complete, it is completely deleted from our system, so that minimizes risks for everyone.”
SequenceShift’s pay-as-you-go model and flexible, commitment-free contracts remove financial risk and onboarding friction, letting customers start, pause and scale usage easily without upfront costs or long-term obligations.
How SequenceShift Manages the Compliance Burden
Customers who outsource their phone payment compliance handling to a service provider like SequenceShift only have to complete 10 of the 24 requirements under SAQ A to show evidence of controls. These requirements can be self-assessed, leaving SequenceShift to handle the more than 300 criteria followed by an audit that come under the scope of the PCI DSS regulation. As Muntean puts it:
“The whole idea of our solution is to reduce that risk and reduce the compliance scope in the customer environment. That’s why [enterprises] choose our solution, as a more efficient alternative to building something similar themselves.”
But in the long run, the compliance obligations and regulatory weight that come with operating any payment system touching card data become a major, ongoing burden.
In some large organizations, the technology department can effectively grind to a halt for three months as teams set aside all other tasks to prepare for a PCI compliance audit. Entire projects stall and roadmaps freeze. And this needs to happen every year. With SequenceShift absorbing the compliance load, that stress disappears.
Beyond relieving today’s compliance burden, SequenceShift actively stays ahead of changing standards, Muntean said, so customers stay current without having to manage any of the complexity themselves. The company certified for PCI DSS 4.0 as soon as it was available, even though there was a transition period of two years from the 3.2 version.
“In the span of the next year, we had a lot of customers reaching out, asking us about the timelines for recertifying the solution with 4.0 and our answer was, ‘we already are compliant with the new version’” Muntean added.
Scaling Secure Payments Anywhere
With data sovereignty increasingly top of mind for enterprise leaders, it’s worth noting that SequenceShift deployments run in the same region as your Amazon Connect. That helps meet growing requirements around data residency, and also isolates systems from widespread outages or breaches. For international companies using multiple Amazon Connect instances in different regions, each location will use an instance of SequenceShift’s solution in the same region.
The solution is scalable too, with the provider’s customers ranging from medical practices that take a few transactions a week to customers that handle thousands of transactions each day. Auto scaling and serverless technologies within AWS allow SequenceShift to scale to the needs of its customers.
Users can gain the trust of their customers by providing consistent security, even for optional protections like Automated Clearing House (ACH), the electronic network for processing financial transactions in the U.S., which are outside the scope of PCI DSS. “Our customers choose to provide the same secure experience when collecting other financial information like ACH and accepting card holder information” Muntean said, “so they can show their customers that they care about it and their commitment to security of customer data.”
Essentially, you deliver the payment experience you want, while SequenceShift handles the compliance risk and operational complexity.
You can find out more about SequenceShift and the company’s full suite of secure payment solutions by visiting the website today.
