If you record calls and you take card payments on those calls, your recording archive is a PCI breach waiting to happen. The PCI Council put it plainly in their 2018 information supplement: card data in audio files counts as stored cardholder data. That means encryption-at-rest, strict access controls, key management, the whole SAQ D control set — applied to a recording archive that probably wasn't designed for it.
Most teams try to plug the hole with pause-and-resume. The agent presses a button when the customer starts reading their card and presses it again when they finish. We've watched this go wrong in every way it can. The agent forgets. The customer reads the card before the agent's ready. The call drops mid-capture. The button doesn't register. Each one of those is a PAN sitting in your archive that an auditor will eventually find.
Real-time DTMF masking removes the human from the equation. The tones get replaced before they reach the recording layer, so there's nothing for the agent to pause and nothing for you to redact later.
We sit in the audio path between your telephony and your recorder. When the agent starts a payment capture, the customer types their card on their handset keypad. Every DTMF tone is intercepted in real time and replaced with a flat audio sample. The masked stream goes to your agent, your recorder, and your quality-monitoring tools. The unmasked digits go straight to the payment gateway over a private path.
We integrate via SIPREC, a SIP fork, or a direct CCaaS connector — Genesys, Five9, NICE CXone, Amazon Connect, RingCentral, 8x8, Talkdesk. No new hardware. No changes to your recorder.
DTMF tones are detected and replaced inside the same audio packet — under 50 ms of added latency. The agent hears the conversation continue. The recorder hears masked audio. The customer hears their own keypad.
Your recorder stores the masked stream. There's no PAN, no CVV, no decodable tones. Quality monitoring, dispute review, and call analytics all work on the masked audio the same way they did before.
Card data goes from the customer's handset to Paytia and on to your gateway — Stripe, Worldpay, Adyen, or wherever you process. Authorisation result returns to the agent in seconds.
We don't do post-call redaction. Two reasons. First, it means your recorder is still in PCI scope until the redaction job finishes, and any recording pulled in between is unredacted. Second, ML-based PAN detection in audio misses things — it's better than nothing for historical cleanup, but it's not a strategy for ongoing compliance.
We don't do pause-and-resume either. We've explained why above. It's a 2010-era workaround that depends on agents getting it right every time, on every call, for ever. The maths don't work.
Real-time DTMF masking pushes the compliance boundary upstream, before the audio ever reaches a system you'd have to audit. That's the design choice that turns a recording archive from a permanent liability into a normal business asset.
If you want to dig into the trade-offs against channel separation — where the agent steps off the audio entirely during capture — we've written that comparison up. Both routes get you to SAQ A. They differ on what the agent does during the 20 seconds of capture.
Anyone who has to record calls for regulatory reasons and also takes card payments on those calls — which is most regulated industries. The FCA's call-recording rules don't grant an exemption for the payment step, so the only safe answer is to record the whole call with the card data scrubbed.
The same masked recording also passes through your analytics and DTMF-aware quality tools without breaking them — the masked tone is detectable as a capture event but contains no recoverable digits.
A 20-minute demo shows how the masked audio sounds, what your recorder sees, and how your scope drops to SAQ A.
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