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Show Notes: PCI NACM – Toronto Post Show Wrap-Up
Quick Take
On this week’s episode of Compliance Unfiltered, the guys are back from their week in Toronto for the PCI-DSS North American Community Meeting! It was blast and you can hear it in their voices.
- Adam and TCT got mobbed at their booth.
- Todd and Friend of the show/TCT Head of Product Jon Dotson got to present at the conference!
- PCI 4.0 news, notes, updates, and fun facts!
We’ll cover all these topics and more, on this week’s episode of Compliance Unfiltered!
Remember to follow Compliance Unfiltered on Twitter.
Read The Transcript
So let’s face it, managing compliance sucks. It’s complicated, it’s so hard to keep organized, and it requires a ton of expertise in order to survive the entire process. Welcome to Compliance Unfiltered, a podcast dedicated to making compliance suck less.
Now, here’s your host, Todd Coshow, with Adam Goslin.
Well, welcome in to another edition of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow, alongside a man who has his black belt in the art of compliance, Adam Goslin. Adam, how the heck are you? I’m doing great, Todd. How about yourself? Man, I am doing fantastic as well. We are back, we are refreshed, we are excited and reinvigorated.
PCI North American Community Meeting Toronto 2022 was a hit. Tell me all about it. Well, we’ll start with high level. A lot of it was related to PCI version 4.0’s release, and all sorts of different topics around things that are coming, new elements that are related to payment security. It was so tough while we were there, they had, in the vendor showcase area, these TV’s up with speakers where you could ostensibly, sit, see, and watch the presentations that were going on. There were several that I wanted to be able to get to, I was able to see it from afar, and hear bits and pieces. Actually, I’ve got a note into the PCI crew, and I’m like, hey, how do I get to all the recordings, that type of thing. So, yeah, I actually, I want to go back and kind of play catch up on some of the ones that I missed, and want to go see, because they had updates on various topics related to PCI standards. So, whether it was software standards, the secure software framework, things around pin, and this whole bevy of different standards that they’ve got. So, they were covering topics there as well. They also had, and we’re gonna talk more about this a little bit later in this podcast, is tech demos from various vendors, which TCT was fortunate enough to be chosen as one of the vendors to go do a tech demo. And then every time that they do these conferences, they always end off with a session specifically for the assessors, so they had that session as well. Actually, I mean, we’ve been so busy since we got back, I haven’t had time to touch base, and follow up with some of the assessors on how that went for them. So, but no, overall, super, super, super cool. Being able to be back in person and seeing people, it’s just, it’s so bizarre since the last time that we were really face-to-face with anybody, it was in 2019, so it was cool.
Yeah, it was cool. Generally, I mean, obviously I was there and had the opportunity to experience it first hand, but for the folks that maybe weren’t able to go, or for folks reminiscing about their time, generally, how did you think that it went for TCT as a whole?
Generally for TCT, oh gosh, I got my motion detectors going nuts. Of course, right. So, for TCT, it went very, very well. Interesting backstory, my wife spent about two decades managing engagements for on site vendor shows, and things along those lines for a company that she worked for. They were doing eight to 12 of these a year. And when we went in 2019, she at the culmination of it, she turned around to me and, she said to me, she’s like, I have never ever experienced what happened at this booth today, or over the last several days, the amount of interest, the number of people stopping by with genuine interest in what’s going on with TCT, she said she hadn’t seen anything like it. The funniest part is, we get to the one this year, and honestly it was about twice as busy. So, all the way around it was fun being able to see that. The purpose of TCT is, helping people, and it’s just fun being able to be there, being able to get to know them, have them get to know us, help them with their problems. It’s just super cool. The positive response from the folks, there were a lot of folks that would walk up. I mean, I’d be sitting there talking with them, and say, have you heard about TCT before? And many people are like nope I hadn’t heard about TCT before. It was just fun being able to explain, here’s who we are, here’s what we do, things along those lines. It was just really, really cool to have those conversations with people, and get them some education, learn about what they do, problems and challenges that they’re experiencing, how we can help. It was just awesome.
Well, to be fair Adam the slogan that did TCT had for this show was uh eye-catching to say the least, well that’s for sure. It’s actually the fun part about this organization, being an organization that as I’ve said in the past is owned by three people, me, myself and I. We don’t have investors, or anybody that can tell us what to do, or how to do it. It really gives us a lot of, I’m going to call it flexibility in terms of our approach to things, and I like pressing the envelope a little bit. Actually walking into it, we had one of our screens that we had for the tech demo, which again, we’ll talk about in a minute, but it had kind of a real sassy title page.
And, one of the concerns that the internals, because oftentimes my willingness to just go put it out there type of thing, is tempered by the internal crew at TCT, who’s like, I’m not sure we should do this. So, when we came out with the badges and stickers and stuff, that says, making compliance management suck less since 2013, I love just being able to put it out there. So, the backdrop on the booth, which everybody internally has been slowly embracing my edginess, if you will. And so, yeah, the backdrop on the booth said something about, helping you get your shit together for a PCI DSS 4.0. One of the people that walked up was kind of giving me a hard time. He’s says, yeah, I’ll have a shot at Jameson, and then he looks at the backdrop of the booth, and he says, because I’m sure you meant shot, not anything else that would be untoward. I turn right around to him, and I’m like, no, we absolutely meant get your shit together,
it’s just fun being able to do that. No, I agree. And it’s something that was clearly well-received. I mean, the promo items that TCT chose to give out to go along with that theme, were little doggy poop bags, just making sure that no one could misconstrue exactly what you meant. Yeah, that worked out so well, right? Like people would come up to the booth, and they would look at the dog poop bag holders, and they’d be like, what’s that? And, your greeting people at the booth with, well, it goes right with our theme, and you’re pointing at the backdrop of the booth and we say, they’re get your shit together dog poop bag holders. Oh, that was just fun. You want to know what, one of the most hilarious parts about the whole thing is, the concern at this point in the game was our kind of internal sales and marketing team meeting was tomorrow. And, we haven’t brought the whole internal team up to speed on this yet, but, all of their concerns about, Oh geez, what are these people going to say? Are we going to get in trouble with the backdrop? And the freaking funniest part about it was, we had members of the PCI council coming up to the booth, standing in front of it, and taking selfies with the get your shit together for PCI 4.0 with the damn thing. Oh, I mean, that absolutely hits. Yeah, it was absolutely perfect. I was loving every bit of it.
Well, what are some of the other fun things that went on at the event? Well, probably, for me, one of the coolest parts was that, and you’ll have to help me remember who, one of the attendees was Heidi. Heidi, oh, Heidi from Mars, right? That’s correct. So, Heidi from Mars comes up to the booth and she says, I just needed to hear you speak. And, I’m kind of looking at her perplexed. And she says, I listen to your podcast, I just love it when you talk about your motion detectors going off. So, right on cue today, huh? Yeah, of course, right? Yeah, yeah, there’s a shout out to you, Heidi. So, the bottom line is that life happens, right? But it was just neat to be able to be in that setting, and having people coming up that are benefiting from the podcasts, and enjoy listening to them and whatnot. It was rewarding to see those connections being made between some of the various stuff that we do.
It was really cool being able to see people that, I mean, we hadn’t had the opportunity to see in a while, like there’s people in this industry that I’ve literally worked with for 15 plus years. And, we’re all spread out all over the place. And oftentimes, the only time that I may get lucky enough to be able to see some of these people throughout the year, is when we go to the PCI conference, to get the band back together, and see people, and better yet, make new friends. Yeah, this is a very tight knit group, and this has been my first time being able to join the PCI Community Meeting in person. It’s very fraternal in a lot of ways, which is extremely cool to see. PCI being as prescriptive as it is, it’s almost like you commiserate with one another having gone through PCI DSS, and I don’t mean that disparagingly by any means whatsoever. It takes a special individual to do this professionally. And, it’s cool to see those groups of folks come together. It was a very fun event.
Yeah, well, one of the things that that happens each year is that PCI, and some of the sponsors of the event, will put on a PCI sponsored evening event, usually the first evening. And this year, it was super, super cool. I don’t know how to how best to describe it, you can jump into the mix to. It was a train depot, it was Toronto’s original train depot like right there on the harbor. Yeah, it was wild because, where we were in the hotel overlooked this. And, when you’re looking down on this train depot, if you listeners don’t know what a train depot is, there’s literally tracks that were all converging into this singular location. And, there was this gigantic circle that had a track on it as well, where they could basically pivot the circle to line the tracks up with the inbound tracks on land, so they can put an engine on that, turn the wheel, have the engine go back off on a different set of rails type of thing. It was the hub of what was the core of Toronto’s train depot area, and the associated buildings with it. That’s where they did the evening event. Just a cool location. It was interesting being able to see all that history. But, more importantly, just being able to go over there, hang out with people they hadn’t seen in a while, rekindling discussions, and friendships that you’ve made either earlier in the year, and prior years. The neat parts is, the more that you get ingrained into the arena, into the PCI space and arena, the more friends you make. And, people are willing to provide introductions to you. Hey, have you met Mary yet, those kind of spontaneous introductions. It was just really, really super cool.
Now, one of the neat parts about the event itself was the opportunity, as you mentioned, for the vendors to showcase their services or their wares, if you will, and TCT got to participate in that. Yeah, it was cool. They do it every year. They call it a tech day. The intent is to have providers showing technology solutions that will assist people that are in the payments space. And, TCT was fortunate enough to be selected as one of the vendors that would do a vendor tech demo. So, I know that the tech demo was presented by you and by Jon Dotson, the Head of Product. And, it was fun because you’re far more comfortable with presenting and speaking in front of people, and things along those lines. John, not so much, but he did an awesome job. But the poor guy, man, I’ll tell you what, I’m sure you knew there was a problem, but, I think it was like five minutes before it was supposed to start, Jon was having some type of an issue with the machine that he was supposed to be doing the presentation on. And he’s like running, he’s calling my phone, running back down to the booth, I’d yank my computer to be able to give it to him to go up and be able to do his tech demo presentation. So, yeah, there were a couple of, we’ll call it last minute hiccups, if you will. I didn’t know we were we were going to go behind the curtain. Yeah, as a matter of fact, now that you bring it up. So funny enough, throughout this entire show we had been you and I, being Mac users had been talking up the merits of Mac as a product as a whole. And Jon, a staunch Windows PC user for a minute or two, having just recently purchased a very expensive box, struggled throughout the entire week, culminating in trying to get the settings configured that we had already tested earlier in the morning, getting them reconfigured to what was required to go and present for the tech demo. And Jon’s machine, just deciding that it needed to update at that very moment. And then, as we’re waiting there, like, oh, okay, perfect timing, Windows. Thanks for that. After updating, says we’re sorry, the update couldn’t complete, and then Jon having the inability to access his computer settings at all whatsoever. Which resulted in Jon having to run down to find you on the floor of the show, in order to get your machine to come run back up in order for us to get hooked in, literally five minutes late hitting the stage. Big shout out to the folks at PCI in Toronto. They did an incredible job on the tech side, working with us, and helping us get out there and present in a way that I guess went relatively well. People seemed pretty excited about what we had to say.
Yeah, the fun part for me. So, I needed to hang back in the booth while you guys were taking care of that. And it was funny, man. I’m not joking. The minute that you guys wrapped that tech demo up, the booth, I don’t know, it was like five to 10 minutes before you guys had gotten down there. And, because you were talking with people on the way out, the booth got mobbed, just mobbed, people coming down. Oh my God, we just saw the tech demo, those guys did awesome. And, they were like, I’d like to know more about this. And I had a ton of people at the booth. So now you guys did good, according to them, I haven’t even had the opportunity to see it yet, which is part of the reason I wanted to be able to get to the recordings. But they were reporting that you guys did a freaking great job, and wanted to come down and talk about it more. So that was cool. That is cool. That’s great to hear.
So the other thing that we got the opportunity to do, and this is new, but it’s something that for those of you out there, if you get the opportunity, we were actually able to co-host a couple of evening events with some of the partners of TCT. They were just kind of like networking opportunities. We were able to partner with Ground Labs and RSI, which is one of TCT’s partners. And then we had the opportunity to partner with OBS, which is a longstanding TCT partner.
Tell me about your event. So for our event, my wife Kit and I went over to the OBS event and it was just, it was awesome. They had found this little kind of bar that had like a downstairs area and they rented out the whole bottom floor of this particular bar. They had food and drinks and all sorts of fun stuff. But the real cool part was number one, being able to just have the TCT the OBS crew able to get in there, and hang out, talk ,and see each other face to face. We work with these guys all year long on different engagements and support related matters. So ,it’s just cool putting faces to voices, and knowing people that have helped throughout the year. But, the better part was that we got the opportunity to invite along a bunch of people to come over, come to the event and whatnot. And, it was just nice being in that setting, and being able to interact with both, either clients, or partners of OBS and TCT. In addition, when we were at the booth, we’d keep telling people, hey, come to one of the evening events, guiding them to either the RSI, or the OBS event, it was cool being able to have them invited, have them stroll over there, and then end up participating, doing it in a relaxed setting, no pressure, just sitting and talking and all that fun stuff. So, the OBS event went extremely well. We were going until, I don’t know, it was relatively late in the evening, but no, it was an absolutely fantastic time, and great seeing the folks that I got to see there.
How about for you and John at RSI? How’d things go over there? The RSI event was fantastic. We went to this incredible little venue called Bar Chef in Toronto. And, they were making specialty cocktails, and they had incredible food, they were walking around with a big spread. We had a wonderful turnout. I don’t want to shout out people by name, because I don’t want to give away their nightlife plans, but what I will say is we had a great turnout and we got to meet a lot of potential partners. We also got the opportunity to meet with a lot of RSI’s current partners, and some folks just across the board, it was really enjoyable to connect, and foster a relationship with. So we couldn’t have been happier. Oh, that’s cool.
So, a couple of other things that we wanted to talk about is general cool things that occurred while we were there. Well, number one, I mean, putting on these events, is a task. Generally speaking, the folks on the PCI Council, they have assisted with organizing, I’ll talk about the people that were helping to organize the event, but the people that do the event coordination, they’re just awesome to work with, they’ve got it together, they’ve got it organized, they’re getting things done in a timely fashion, navigating you through the waters. They pick nice locations, all that fun stuff. It was great from that perspective folks that are actually on the PCI Council, that was super cool, this year in particular. I noticed, that there were a number of people actually on the Council that were coming by, talking to us, wanting to learn more. A gentleman, that was out in the Asia region, that was on the Council, he came by the booth. The best part was, a couple of the folks on the Council had done this, sat, talked to us and whatnot, walked off, and then next thing you know, they’re dragging people back over to the booth. You’ve got to talk to these guys. You’ve got to hear what they’re all about. It’s really nice to have the leadership of the Council, just partnering with, and assisting and helping the folks that were at the show and the vendors, helping folks subject to compliance, get connected with solutions that would help them, based on their knowledge of need all the way around, just super awesome.
I don’t know if I brought this up on the podcast previously, and people probably could say if I did or didn’t, or you missed it. If you can’t tell from my oats and abouts and all that fun stuff, I’m originally from Canada, so being in Toronto, I don’t know if I told you this, my grandparents had a place in Toronto, that was all of about 30 minutes from where we were in downtown. Yeah. And, so as a kid, I’d been going to Toronto for summers and stuff like that. Toronto’s just a cool city. The location was literally immediately beside the CN tower, which is just awesome to behold. But, there’s just so much going on down there. There’s a billion restaurants, people are nice, it’s just an enjoyable experience.
What were some of your thoughts on location and things to do? It was incredible. I love Toronto. Toronto is one of my favorite cities. And, the first thing that I would do is shout out our buddy Jon Dotson for doing a heck of a job finding us great places to eat throughout the city. Oh, I second that. Yeah, man, this guy is on another level when it comes to his food. And, I had the best pad thai in my life. And, no free ads here, but let’s just say that this place, added Tom Yung paste to their pad thai, and changed my entire world. So, shout out to Jon Dotson, and shout out to Toronto for the incredible food, and the location of the event. I mean, shout out to you for finding the hotel that was attached directly to the convention center. We’ll say that that was a game changer in itself. So well, I was going to say, the best part for me, and I agree 100 percent. Shout out to Jon, because he did it. I’m easy going, right?
I’ll go wherever, I’ll eat wherever I find something. I mean, my requirements are, it’s not living, and it’s not raw. So those are my two baseline requirements, beyond that, I don’t care. So he had basically his pick of wherever, and he’s really good at picking out good places. He ended up finding this awesome poutine shop that was down the road from the hotel. I know that the four of us went out there and grabbed a bite to eat, the first evening we got there. And we ended up deciding, I think you ended up having to head out on Thursday that evening, we ended up deciding to go back to that place. Oh, is that right? Yeah, for a late night snack. So oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, you gotta get poutine when you go to Canada, it’s just a thing, got to try it. And if you ask Jon, he’ll tell you extra cheese curds.
Parting thoughts and shots, Adam. Well, honestly, the overall experience with the PCI conference this year was just frickin awesome. When I compare this year to 2019, we got mobbed twice as much as we did in 2019, which was just frickin great. I love helping people, love being able to meet people, love making new friends, all that fun stuff. So, we were having a fair amount of conversations while we were there. TCT is going to be swinging up an instance over in Europe, in Q4 of this year. And so, some of the discussions we were having were about next year, being obviously at the US one, we’re planning on going to the session in Europe as well. And you never know, we might make it over to Asia too. We’ll, see how that goes. But no, it’s just, I really, really, really enjoy the group of people that we get to hang out with, and interact with at these events. And I’m really, really looking forward to next year. Awesome stuff.
That right there, that’s the best stuff there is. Well, that’s all the time we have for this episode of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow. And I’m Adam Goslin. Hope we help to get you fired up to make your compliance suck less.
