In a sign that the overall payments industry attitude toward encryption and card data security might be changing, Heartland executives told analysts and reporters that the company saw a competitive advantage in developing end to end encryption.

Speaking on a conference call about the company's first quarter earnings and future prospects Heartland CEO Robert Carr answered an analyst's question that the company sees improved encryption as a way to differentiate itself in the market.

"The answer is yes, we do think it's a competitive advantage," Carr said. "We're doing TRS and encryption which is a hardware encryption right at the point of data entry through the mag stripe into the system. We think that will be a point of differentiation and many, many merchants want to be out of having card numbers going through their POS systems and there's a lot of interest in it in the marketplace."