No racks, no headsets, no per-seat hardware.
When a customer types their card details on a phone keypad, every keypress generates a DTMF audio tone — that's the chirp you hear when you press a number on a phone call. Those tones are loud, distinct, and trivially decodable. Anyone with the call audio has the card number.
DTMF masking software intercepts those tones before they reach anywhere they shouldn't — your agent's headset, your CCaaS, your call recording, your QA review system, your screen-capture tool, the analytics platform that watches calls for sentiment. It replaces them with a flat audio chirp. The real tones go to our platform, get decoded into a card number, and get posted to your payment gateway. The cardholder data never enters your environment in any form.
You'll also see it called DTMF suppressionor DTMF clamping. Same technology. We led with "suppression" for years; most buyers search for "masking," so that's the term we lead with now. If you came in looking for "DTMF blocking software" or "keypad tone masking," you're in the right place.
Older DTMF approaches put a physical device in the audio path — a clamping appliance in your telephony rack, a per-seat USB attachment between the agent's phone and headset, or a dedicated session border controller. They worked, but they're slow to deploy, painful to scale, and they create a new piece of hardware your IT team has to own.
We integrate by SIP or API into whatever telephony you already run. No rack space, no agent-desk hardware, no firmware updates. Spinning up additional agents is a config change, not a procurement cycle.
Modern cloud contact centres — Genesys, Five9, NICE CXone, Amazon Connect, Talkdesk, 8x8, RingCentral, 3CX — slot in cleanly. Same for traditional PBX behind a SIP trunk. We don't care which.
Most cloud setups are taking calls inside a working week. The bottleneck is usually your internal change-control process, not our integration. We've done it inside 48 hours when a customer had a hard PCI deadline.
We're a PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider — the highest tier — and Cyber Essentials Plus certified. Your QSA gets a clean attestation pack covering our scope, so your assessment focuses on your residual SAQ A scope only.
PCI DSS v4.0.1 (current since March 2024) puts any system that stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data inside your assessable scope. If your agent's desktop carries card audio, it's in scope. If your CCaaS records that audio, it's in scope. If you ship recordings off to a third-party QA tool, that vendor's in scope too. You're looking at SAQ D — 329 controls — and a much bigger annual audit bill.
With our DTMF masking solutionin the call path, none of those systems ever sees card data. Cardholder data goes from the customer's phone straight to us, and from us to your payment gateway. Your environment drops to SAQ A — 22 controls — same as a tokenised checkout on your website.
For a typical 50-agent contact centre that translates to a faster audit, a smaller penetration-test surface, and one less reason for your security team to be on the phone to your CCaaS vendor when something needs evidence. If you want the deep dive, read our Compliance 101 modules on phone-payment scope reduction.
DTMF masking isn't the only software-driven approach. We also offer channel separation, which sits on the same compliance footing. The difference is what your agent does during the capture.
Agent stays live on the audio through the capture. They can talk the customer through it, reassure them, answer questions, and pick the conversation up the moment the payment authorises. One key press per call, on-screen progress indicator.
Pick this when you want the agent engaged through the payment step — retention calls, upsell, complex sales.
Agent's audio path goes off-line during the capture. Voice prompts drive the customer through entering their card. Agent comes back on once the payment authorises. Zero agent training because the agent does nothing during the capture.
Pick this when you want zero agent involvement in card handling — high-volume bill payments, outsourced contact centres.
Mostly contact centrestaking agent-assisted MOTO payments — insurance premiums, utility bills, retention saves, charity gifts, healthcare co-pays. The common thread is the agent needing to be engaged through the payment step. A retention agent isn't going to mute themselves halfway through a save call.
We've also seen it pick up in field-service scheduling, where a dispatcher takes payment from a customer mid-call to confirm a same-day booking. The agent stays on the line, the booking confirms, the engineer goes. No call-back, no payment link, no friction.
It listens to the call audio during the card-entry step, recognises the keypad tones the customer is pressing, and replaces them with a flat replacement sound in real time. The agent and the call recording only ever hear the flat sound. The real digits go from the customer's handset to our platform and on to your payment gateway. No card data enters your network, your agent's headset, or your recording archive.
Software-only. We integrate by SIP or API. There's no DTMF clamping box to rack in your data centre, no per-seat headset device, no firmware to update. If you're on a modern CCaaS — Genesys, Five9, NICE CXone, Amazon Connect, Talkdesk, 8x8, RingCentral — we slot in alongside it. If you're on a SIP trunk straight into a traditional PBX, that works too. We've also seen plenty of hybrid setups; we don't care which.
Cloud CCaaS integrations are typically two to four working days. Plain SIP trunk setups can be live in two to three days. On-prem PBX integrations run five to ten working days. The slow bit is almost always change-window approvals on your side — once we've got routing config and a sandbox account on your gateway, our side is straightforward.
PCI DSS v4.0.1 puts every system that stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data in scope. If your agent's desktop, your CCaaS, and your call recording all carry card audio, they're all in scope and you're looking at SAQ D — 329 controls. With our DTMF masking software running, none of those systems ever sees the card data. Most customers drop to SAQ A (22 controls). That's the headline change, and it's audited the same way you'd audit any tokenised checkout flow.
A bit. The agent enters the amount, presses one key to start the capture, and watches an on-screen progress indicator until the payment authorises. That's the entire behaviour change. Most teams pick it up inside a single shift. If you want zero agent involvement during the payment step, look at channel separation instead — the platform drives the capture and the agent doesn't touch anything.
Both work. The DTMF tones a mobile generates are the same audio frequencies as a desk phone — that standard hasn't changed since the 1960s. We see the same detection accuracy across iPhones, Android handsets, desk phones, and softphones. The only edge case is some Bluetooth headsets that compress audio aggressively; we widen our detection tolerance to compensate and almost never see a failed capture as a result.
They press * to clear and re-enter. If the entered number fails the Luhn check, our platform prompts them to try again — they hear a short voice prompt, the agent sees the retry on screen but no digits. The agent can talk to the customer at any point during the entry; the voice channel stays open.
We'll walk you through a live capture on your kind of call setup, show you what the agent sees, and answer the PCI scope questions your QSA is going to ask.
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