Case Study: Helzberg Diamonds achieves 98% reduction in back-office PCI DSS scope with Liaison Technologies (Liaison Protect)

Helzberg Diamonds Reduces PCI DSS Scope in its Back Office by 98 Percent

Helzberg Diamonds, a century-old Berkshire Hathaway jeweler with 234 stores and an ecommerce site, needed to strengthen cardholder data protections to meet PCI DSS requirements. Although POS terminals encrypted card data in stores, numbers were decrypted at headquarters and remained exposed across hundreds of back-end systems, and the POS vendor would not share its encryption/decryption code—creating complex key management and compliance challenges.

Helzberg implemented Liaison Protect with format-preserving tokenization, distributing a single Liaison encryption key to POS systems, centralizing tokenization in a segregated PCI zone, and storing encrypted PANs in a secure vault. The change let tokens replace card numbers in back-end systems without schema changes, cutting PCI DSS scope from about 400 systems to 10—an approximate 98% reduction—while improving control and customer data protection.

Helzberg Diamonds

Florian Yanez

Manager of Technical Systems