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As the U.S. payment card industry hurtles toward its EMV destiny approaching on Oct. 1, the process for certifying EMV-compliant point-of-sale terminals is moving along well, albeit with one exception.
Point-of-sale systems, which are available in a myriad of configurations with software from one company, hardware from another and payment processing from a third, face the challenge of uniting these disparate components into one service that meets the standards for EMV transactions.
“As always, the big players are ready,” says Xavier Giandominici, director of FIME America, the U.S. arm of France-based chip-services company FIME. “The smaller merchants will solve quickly their issues with acquirers and processors.”
That leaves mid-size merchants, which comprise a significant share of the card-accepting base. “This is mostly where there is effectively a long tail,” Giandominici tells Digital Transactions News.
The EMV migration for mid-size merchants will extend beyond the card networks’ Oct. 1 liability shift date. Not quite half—47%—of all U.S. merchants are expected to have EMV-enabled POS terminals by year’s end, says a survey from the Payments Security Task Force, an industry group.
With thousands of POS systems developers and as many as 2,500 value-added resellers distributing these programs, the task is daunting, and complex. The complication for mid-size merchants that use POS systems is that each configuration must be EMV-certified for each processor.
That’s where the U.S. EMV VAR Qualification Program steps in. Launched in April by the Payments Security Task Force and the PCI Security Standards Council, the program aims to help VARs and independent software vendors complete a pre-qualification process to expedite the EMV certification process for the systems they sell.
Merchant acquirers can validate that a VAR or ISV has completed the program, says Stephanie Ericksen, vice president of risk products at Visa Inc. That is done after the VAR or ISV has submitted the system for review by a participating service provider.
The payments industry “recognized that the mid-tier would need a little more support,” Ericksen tells Digital Transactions News.
Successful participation in the qualification program may shorten the duration of the formal testing with acquirers because there may be fewer reported issues, debugging steps and versions to submit for testing, the program’s list of frequently asked questions states. The program is not a replacement for the certification provided by the acquirer that is mandated for each specific POS setup or payment configuration, the site notes.
As Giandominici sees it, the mid-tier merchants, and the companies serving them with POS systems, can benefit from the program. “It helps them understand what it means [to become EMV compliant],” he says. “It’s a practical education on how to implement EMV.”
