July 1st 2010 is the date set down by the PCI Security Council for when all companies doing e-business, no matter what their size, to be fully compliant with the PCI DSS regulations.

All the relevant regulations are listed on the PCI website. The PCI Security Council has as its aim the reduction of credit card fraud worldwide, and comprises five of the world's largest credit card companies.

The new regulations which come into force in July are concerned primarily with payment applications. Payment applications include anything which can accept, store or process electronically, credit card information. A shopping cart on a website is a payment application since this is in contact with a customer's credit card information.

By July 1st all merchants' payment applications must be PA DSS compliant and also the overall systems management of the website must be PCI DSS compliant, and must be run according to the Security Council rules. The Security Council is running out of patience with companies who are slow to achieve compliancy, and is likely to impose heavy fines on those who do not achieve compliance in time.

Banks which do business with non-PCI compliant e-merchants are in line for fines ranging from £5000 per month to £500,000, fines which will be handed down to the merchants themselves via increased fees or even a termination of business.

If you run a business which comes into contact with customers' credit card details then do two things today – contact an QSV or Qualified Scanning Vendor who will be able to tell you how much you need to do to achieve compliance. And get hold of a Self-Assessment Questionnaire for PCI DSS compliance. July 1st is just around the corner – not being compliant on this date could be commercial suicide.