Heartland Payment Systems plans to protect its credit- and debit-card processing network with an end-to-end encryption system that it will begin rolling out with its merchants in the third quarter. This will be the first effort of its kind in the United States. Heartland has not yet publicly released the technical specifications of the hardware and software it is spending millions of dollars to develop. Heartland's processing network is used by 175,000 merchant customers at 250,000 locations so it is necessary to use the specialized encryption to secure the transactions. The long-term goal at Heartland is to require end-to-end encryption once the first trial period succeeds. Avivah Litan, Gartner analyst, notes that end-to-end encryption has already gotten underway in Spain among merchants and their processors. In the United States today there is no established standard for end-to-end encryption of payment-processing networks. But Heartland is hoping to rally the industry around one based on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that it's proposing to the Accredited Standards Committee X9 (ASC X9) in early June. Accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to work on standards for the financial-services industry, ASC X9 is expected to take up work on developing a new standard to protect cardholder data. Heartland's plans to defend its network through end-to-end encryption standard may not be fully in sync with current requirements for card security set by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. But as Litan says, Visa in March publicly noted that PCI security standards alone may not be enough to protect cardholder data. Visa has signaled it is open to some other approaches, such as end-to-end encryption.