Blog

Humans have not been to the Moon in fifty years, but the space race is hotter than ever. In 2012, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left our Solar System with a copy of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In 2020, a Chinese lunar rover explored what lies beneath the Moon’s surface with ground-penetrating radar. Last week, Russia tested an anti-satellite weapon, which created so much debris that astronauts aboard the International Space Station prepared for possible evacuation. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes to send humans to Mars by 2024.

Note: Throughout this piece, I will be referring to Jordan McKee’s excellent playbook on optimizing payment systems for the coming decade, Moving Payments From Commodity to Commerce Catalyst Through Optimization and Orchestration. It is behind a subscriber wall, but I encourage you to check it out, along with all the fine work Jordan and his team are doing in this space.†

My Kingdom for a Horse!

In his play King Richard the Third, William Shakespeare wrote that the death of a single horse can bring down an entire kingdom. In 2018, hackers proved something similar in the world of cybercrime. By injecting a mere 22 lines of code into the supply chain of the British Airways website, the bad guys made off with 500,000 credit card numbers.

This morning, the VGS Team at Money 20/20 in Vegas officially launched VGS Payment Optimization to the market. The flagship feature of this suite of products is Payment Orchestration, which allows clients to integrate easily with - and then route transactions among - payment gateways and Payment Service Providers (PSPs). A single, low-code integration to the VGS platform lets you set custom routing logic to reduce costs and increase transaction throughput while aggregating and owning all your payments data.

What It Is & Why It Matters

Many of us can remember our introduction to the power of compound interest at a young age. Maybe it was a grade school math teacher narrating the rice and chessboard fable or an early financial literacy course scaring you into saving for retirement by quoting Einstein: “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it … he who doesn't pays it.”

An All-In-One Checkout Experience for Optimized Secure Payments

VGS has simplified security and compliance for hundreds of businesses in the payments industry, helping merchants collect payments data both faster and more securely with our data security platform and libraries like VGS Collect and VGS Show.

VGS is a Forbes 2021 Next Billion-Dollar Startup – WOAH! We’re thrilled to be one of only 25 companies selected for this distinction by Forbes and TrueBridge Capital Partners.

At VGS, we say we’re committed to real security. But what does that actually mean? Let’s illustrate it by contrasting ‘real security’ with ‘security theater;’ otherwise known as ‘faking it’ or ‘checking the box’. It’s like leaving a spare key under your doormat — Yes, technically your home is locked, but a thief is likely to find your spare, and make off with your Playstation 5. Security theater is lazy, short-sighted, and high-risk.

VGS has teamed up with Cobalt, an innovative Pentest-as-a-Service (PtaaS) company, to help businesses improve their security posture and achieve compliance easier by protecting sensitive data.

If you are looking for SOC 2 compliance, you've likely heard some vendors claim they can magically make your business compliant in a ‘Fast and Furious’ fashion. But unfortunately, information security is not drag racing. If you move too fast, your efforts are likely to backfire.