What Are The Critical EMV Steps For SMB Merchants?

By Allen Friedman, Director of Payments, Ingenico North America

EMV is the acronym for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, who collaborated on the creation of a standard and framework to utilize Smart Card technology for payments. EMV is now administered by EMVCo, which is responsible for managing and updating the specifications to keep pace with payments technology. Smart cards contain, computer micro-chips imbedded in the card, allowing for increased card security and additional functionality.  Most other commercialized countries adopted this payment solution over the last 20 years, resulting in drastic reductions in card present credit card fraud. That fraud is migrating to the U.S., and we are finally on the path to implement EMV. Most merchant acquirers and processors have completed their implementation as mandated by the card brands. 

What does EMV implementation mean for application developers and services providers? 

Although merchants are not mandated to support these new cards, there is a liability shift coming in October, 2015 that will place the cost of card fraud on the merchant if their technology is less secure than the issuers. This has already begun to create merchant demand for EMV-ready point of sale solutions (POS). Many solutions providers in the U.S. are unfamiliar with EMV, and even providers with previous EMV experience in other regions will need to make accommodations for the unique U.S. payments environment. 

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