Aircall is one of the easier cloud phone systems to live with. The CRM integrations work, the routing rules behave, and new agents can be onboarded in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. What it doesn't do — and was never designed to do — is take card payments without dragging your call recordings into PCI scope.
If you're taking payments over the phone through Aircall today, every recorded call that includes a card number is a piece of cardholder data sitting in your storage. The recording archive, the QA tool that plays it back, the transcription service that turns it into text — all of it inherits PCI obligations the moment a customer reads out their PAN. That's not an Aircall problem; it's a problem with any call recording layer that captures payment conversations without masking.
The fix is to add a DTMF masking layer between the customer's keypad and the audio Aircall records. Paytia is the masking service we run, and we've built integrations so Aircall users can keep their existing setup and bolt on PCI-compliant card capture without rewiring their telephony estate. Here's how it works and what's involved in setting it up.
The PCI problem with Aircall call recordings#
Aircall records calls by default, and that's usually a feature — recordings drive coaching, dispute resolution, and quality scoring. The trouble starts when payments enter the conversation. If your agent asks a customer to read out their card number, the recording captures it. The recording sits in Aircall's storage, gets pulled into your QA workflows, downloaded into training datasets, and replayed during dispute investigations. Each of those touchpoints now handles cardholder data.
Under PCI DSS, anywhere a Primary Account Number lives is part of your cardholder data environment. The recording archive is in scope. The QA platform is in scope. Agents who can replay calls are in scope. Our broader piece on PCI compliance for telephone payments walks through the full set of requirements, but the headline is simple: a single payment call with an unmasked PAN can pull your entire Aircall estate into a SAQ D obligation.
What you need before you start#
Three things need to be in place before we touch anything. First, Aircall admin access — the integration is configured through your account's call routing layer, so you'll need someone who can edit numbers and IVR flows. Second, a payment gateway. We integrate with Stripe, Worldpay, Adyen, Braintree, and most of the major UK and European acquirers, so you can keep whatever processor you've already got. Third, a Paytia account configured against your gateway credentials — that's a 30-minute onboarding call with our team, not a procurement project.
You don't need to upgrade your Aircall plan, change phone numbers, or pause your existing flows. The integration adds a parallel path for the payment portion of a call rather than replacing anything Aircall already does well.
How the Paytia + Aircall integration works#
The flow looks like this. An agent is on a normal Aircall call and reaches the point where a card payment is needed. They click "Secure Pay" in their Paytia console, which sits in a browser tab alongside the Aircall workspace. Paytia generates a payment session tied to the order amount, currency, and reference.
At that point, Aircall briefly bridges the customer into Paytia's DTMF capture service. The agent stays on the line throughout — they can talk to the customer, reassure them, read out the amount being charged. What changes is the audio path during the few seconds of card entry. The customer's keypad tones go to Paytia, not Aircall. Paytia plays neutral progress audio back into the Aircall leg, so the recording captures flat tones or comfort noise instead of card digits. Our deep-dive on channel separation covers the audio-path mechanics if you want the full technical picture.
The customer keys their card number, expiry, and CVV. Paytia validates each field in real time and shows the agent a masked progress view — typically the first four digits and the rest as dots, so they can confirm with the customer it's the right card. Paytia then tokenises the card, sends the authorisation through your existing gateway, and returns a result. Approved or declined, the answer comes back to the agent's Paytia console within seconds, and the agent can move straight into thanking the customer or handling a retry.
From Aircall's perspective, it's a normal call. The recording runs end to end. The CRM logs the activity. Reporting works as it always did. The only thing missing from the recording is the card data — because the card data never travelled down that path. That's what DTMF masking delivers in practice.
Setting it up step by step#
The setup is short. Most Aircall teams are taking live payments through Paytia within a working day, sometimes faster if they've got their gateway credentials handy.
Step one is gateway configuration. Inside the Paytia portal, you add your payment gateway credentials — API keys for Stripe or Adyen, merchant IDs for Worldpay, that sort of thing. Paytia handles the tokenisation and processing call to the gateway, so your acquirer relationship doesn't change.
Step two is connecting Aircall. We route the masked payment leg through a Paytia-managed number that bridges into your Aircall flow. There's no SIP trunk surgery and no Aircall plan change. If you've already used a guide like our 3CX setup walkthrough, the Aircall version follows the same pattern — connect the number, point the secure-pay action at the masked service, and you're done. Our team does this part with you on a screenshare; it's not a self-serve config the first time around.
Step three is testing in sandbox. Paytia ships with a full sandbox that mirrors live, so you can run a payment end to end without moving real money. You'll dial in as a test customer, the agent triggers a secure-pay session, you key a test card, and you watch the result flow back to the console. Your QA team can listen to the test recording afterwards and confirm there's no card data in the audio. That demonstration usually convinces anyone in the compliance team faster than a slide deck does.
Step four is going live. Once you're comfortable in sandbox, we flip the same configuration to production. The Paytia console handles the environment switch — there's no separate redeploy on the Aircall side. The first live payment is normally taken with our implementation team on a call so any small wrinkles get sorted in real time.
What stays the same in Aircall#
This is the part that matters to operations teams. Agent workflow doesn't change. They still answer in Aircall, see the customer's CRM card pop, and wrap up in the same screen. The only new step is clicking "Secure Pay" when a payment is due — most teams pick that up in a single training session.
Routing rules stay where they are. IVR menus, business-hours flows, voicemail behaviour, ring groups — none of it needs reworking. CRM integrations carry on as before, so your payment activity still surfaces in HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, or whichever system you've connected. Aircall reporting still measures call volumes, talk time, and outcomes. Recordings still run for the full call.
What changes after integration#
The big shift is PCI scope. Once card data stops landing in Aircall recordings, the recording archive comes out of your cardholder data environment. So do the QA platform, the transcription pipeline, the analytics tools that read call metadata, and the agent workstations themselves. The systems that touch cardholder data narrow to the Paytia integration layer plus your gateway.
Recordings can stay full-length. There's no need for pause-and-resume gymnastics, no awkward gap in the audio, no risk of an agent forgetting to hit pause. Compliance becomes a vendor management exercise — reviewing Paytia's Attestation of Compliance once a year — rather than an operational one. For most Aircall users we work with, that's the difference between an SAQ D and an SAQ A, which is a roughly tenfold reduction in annual compliance workload.
Frequently asked questions#
Does Paytia require an Aircall paid plan upgrade?
No. The integration works with any Aircall plan that supports outbound and inbound calls. You don't need a higher tier, custom routing add-ons, or the developer API. We've onboarded teams on the entry-level Aircall plan and on the enterprise tier with no difference in setup.
Can we keep our existing payment gateway?
Yes — that's the usual setup. Paytia integrates with Stripe, Worldpay, Adyen, Braintree, Opayo, and most major UK and European acquirers. Your gateway relationship, pricing, settlement terms, and fraud rules stay exactly as they are. Paytia sits in front of the gateway as the secure capture layer, not as a replacement processor.
Does it work with Aircall's CRM integrations (HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho)?
Yes. Aircall's CRM integrations log the call activity as normal, and Paytia's own integrations write the payment outcome back into the same CRM record. So you end up with the call note and the payment result on the same contact, without duplicate data entry. We've got direct hooks into HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho, and a generic webhook for anything else.
What's the typical setup time?
From signed contract to first live payment, most Aircall teams are running in two to five business days. The bulk of that is your internal scheduling — agent training, finance sign-off, picking a go-live window. The actual technical setup runs in a couple of hours with our implementation team on a screenshare.
How is pricing structured?
Paytia pricing is built around your volume and the gateways you use, so it's quoted per customer rather than from a public price list. There's a small monthly platform fee plus a per-transaction charge for the masking and capture service. Your gateway fees are unchanged. Get in touch and we'll give you a number based on your actual call and payment volumes.
Aircall is a great fit for teams that want a flexible, cloud-native phone system without running their own telephony stack. Bolting on DTMF masking through Paytia keeps the parts of Aircall you already rely on and removes the one part that's been holding your PCI scope hostage. If you're already taking payments through Aircall without a masking layer, the scope reduction alone usually pays for the integration inside a year.
If you'd like to see the integration on a real call rather than a slide deck, book a demo and we'll walk through it with one of our Aircall customers' setups. Or if you'd rather start with a conversation about your specific call flow and gateway, get in touch and we'll work through it with you.
Ready to set up Paytia + Aircall?
Most Aircall integrations go live within days. We'll walk you through the technical setup — routing, payment gateway connection, sandbox testing — on a 15-minute call. No agent retraining required; your team keeps the workflow they already know.
