Becoming a contractor for Hong Kong finance jobs

Contract roles can offer you greater flexibility, work/life balance and the opportunity to increase hourly earnings and many contract positions are there when you search for Hong Kong finance jobs.
Many professionals consider themselves to be career contractors. As well as being specialists in their field, their strengths lie in quickly fitting in and delivering for a new team, expertly managing key projects.
Take Your Skills to a New Level
The variety that comes with working in contract roles increases your skills base, industry knowledge, experience and exposure to dynamic environments. It gives you the opportunity to test your capabilities in new environments, helping you to make the next all-important career decision. This is the reason why many people take up contract jobs when they search for Hong Kong finance jobs.
Case Study: The Contractor's Point Of View:
Contracting while you're travelling is also a viable option and there are contract roles available both nationally and internationally.

"The main benefits of being a contractor are higher income and flexibility. If you work an eight or nine-month contract at a high level of pay, you can decide if you then want to take some time off, perhaps to travel, without being concerned about money.

Even if you go straight into another contract in the same type of role, you're changing your environment - you're dealing with different cultures, different sizes of company and different people, so you can keep renewing yourself. The biggest frustration on the other hand, is that you're often viewed as an outsider, or as someone who has taken a job from an existing employee. This is understandable, because you might have come in to do something that is not necessarily part of the culture of the company.

In terms of making contract workers effective from day one, I'd say that where clients have told staff about your role as a contractor and have given them the opportunity to ask questions - you are accepted much more quickly and can get on with the task you have been set. In addition, I would advise employers to make the best of all the skills their contractors possess. Contractors brought in for a specialist role often get frustrated if they're capable of more and are happy to take on additional tasks, why not take advantage of all the skills they've learnt from the many different companies in their Hong Kong finance jobs?"

What are PCI compliance requirements?

It is important to gain trust of your clients or customers. It becomes more important when you are conducting your business online as your customers don’t know you personally and only thing which would give them confidence to do transaction on your site is your PCI compliance seal.
PCI compliance is a must for all merchants who process, store or transmit any information related to credit cards as well as debit cards. If there is a breach for non-compliance to PCI DSS, PCI imposes heavy fines on banks and they pass it to you. Thus, it is very important to know which are PCI compliance requirements and ways in which you can comply to them.
At present there are around 12 PCI compliance requirements but these can be broken individually into above 200 requirements. Though some of PCI compliance requirements are very important and easy to implement, however, there are some which takes lot of time, resources and money. However, it must be kept in mind that all PCI compliance requirements are important to comply. Compliance to PCI compliance requirements is best method for ensuring system security and winning trust of your prospective clients or customers. Here, some of important PCI compliance requirements are being listed:
Installing and maintaining a strong firewall: It is one of most important and basic PCI compliance requirements. It is very important to defend all of the sensitive data that your server will be transmitting and firewalls allow you to do it easily.
Not using default or vendor supplied passwords: When you get access to accounts, sometimes you are given a default username and password by your merchant. It is important to change the default passwords as these are well known to hackers. By not complying with these PCI compliance requirements, you are leaving a door open with a glow sign saying come and steal.
Protecting data of cardholder: All the data related to debit or card holder must be protected. These PCI compliance requirements ask you to store data with encryption so that even in case of breach, hacker can’t see the real data and without correct decryption key, data is useless to him.
Encrypted Transmission of data: This is another among important PCI compliance requirements which you need to comply with. All the data sent over servers should be encrypted so that no one can steal or manipulate data when you are transmitting it.

Exhaustive PCI compliance checklist

If you are a merchant, it is important that you must know PCI compliance checklist in order to avoid fines. PCI is an acronym for Payment Card Industry and is used for five giant payment processors: MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Vis and Japanese Credit Bureau. These five providers have agreements with issuing banks across the world and bank on behalf of them, issue credit and debit card worldwide.
When PCI needs compliance to its security standard which is also known was PCI data security standard, then banks will be following the same and place PCI DSS requirements in merchant agreement and all the merchants who want POS terminals should be complying it. In case, security breach takes place due to PCI noncompliance then a large fine is imposed on the bank. Bank then passes these fines on its merchants or providers who provide online services. Thus, it is important for merchants to have a thorough knowledge of PCI compliance checklist and they should be complaining to it in order to avoid any penalty imposed by their issuing bank.
Following is the PCI compliance checklist and compliance to it earns you certification of PCI DSS.
You should be maintaining firewalled and secured networks. All the traffic needs to be encrypted and unauthorized access should be denied. The traffic encompass digital traffic, onsite staff browsers, emails, wireless web, from internet, person-to-person network and many other forms.
Retaining card holder data securely: It is absolute must for business purposes that all the data related to card like card number which is stored on merchant’s computer should be done by encryption. This will render card data useless in case of hacking. Without having right security key, the intruder will not be able to correctly decrypt the data.
Transmitting encrypted data of card holder over public networks which he submits it. This may include wrongly configured wireless networks or badly configured one. When data is encrypted, it can’t be read correctly when it is transmitted over public network.
Ongoing maintenance of vulnerability assessment procedures: The merchant has to keep all this software up to date, so that it has no known security loopholes which hackers can exploit. A state of art antivirus must be installed on house and the application development should be complying with standard secured programming practices.
Thus, this was basic PCI compliance checklist which every merchant should comply to. When you comply with PCI compliance checklist, chances of avoiding fines related to PCI improve dramatically.