Offering EMV insight
With 1.62 billion EMV-compliant payments cards in use worldwide, EMV has transformed the payments landscape. However, as one of the last major economies to adopt EMV, the US remains vulnerable to fraud and must now meet imminent deadlines to transition from the traditional magnetic-stripe to Chip-based payments. CreditCall, the payments services provider, has published its guide ‘How an EMV-enabled Payment Gateway can support migration to Chip’ to help Integrators, VARs and Processors through the technology shift.
A major hurdle in the move to the EMV standard is the scale and cost of implementation, requiring virtually every single terminal to be modified or replaced, and banks to re-issue credit and debit cards. However, organisations that deliver EMV-compliant solutions can achieve a major advantage against competitors that are slower to market. They will also enable the US payments industry to close the gap on fraud migrating from other regions. Plastic card fraud in the US, using the still existing mag-stripe of skimmed or stolen UK Chip cards alone, reached almost USD25 million (GBP16.3 million) in 2011, according to Financial Fraud Action UK.
CTO Jeremy Gumbley comments on the US EMV migration issues: “With some 8.5 million merchants in the US, the potentially huge volume of testing and processing requests will put a significant strain on Processors’ certification resources.
“One way for organizations to overcome these challenges is to learn from approaches that have already proved successful in other EMV-compliant regions. These include pre-certified solutions that bundle common components such as PIN-pads with an EMV-ready payment gateway. This avoids the need for Integrators and VARs to build from scratch and also reduces the certification burden.
”While reduced fraud and greater global interoperability are major benefits, there is an opportunity for organizations to achieve a competitive advantage with quick-to-market offerings. Rather than ignore the inevitable, organizations must face up to the challenges and avoid being the last man standing.”
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