EMV: Challenges And Opportunities For VARs
It’s no surprise the “View From The Top: Leadership Panel” at this year’s Retail Solutions Providers Association’s RetailNOW included a discussion of EMV.
VARs and other IT solutions providers are working toward enabling merchants to accept payments compliant with EMV, a global standard for debit and credit cards that leverages chip card technology, by October 2015. At that time, the liability for transactions made with counterfeit cards will shift to acquirers and merchants — and the least compliant party will be responsible for covering the full cost of the fraudulent transaction.
To open the discussion on the topic, Jim Roddy, president of Business Solutions magazine (BSM), who moderated the panel, read a portion of a BSM article, quoting one of the panelists, Matt Taylor, president of Integrated Payments for Mercury Payment Systems, a Vantiv company:
EMV is probably the elephant in the room that everyone's ignoring. It’s going to be a big opportunity for VARs to guide their merchants through this transition in a timely manner. When was the last change that big?
“EMV is big,” replied Taylor, “Let’s face it, the security threats are increasing, and there’s a lot of high profile activity. EMV, whether or not you agree it's the right technology, is not going away.”
He says the value chain is beginning to make investments: working with software developers, piloting EMV solutions, and working with VARs to sell them, “so that we can remove the friction getting it on the counter tops.”
Jay Miley, Ingram Micro’s vice president and general management of its advanced technology division in the United States, points out “It’s going to be a big opportunity for all of us in the room. Controversy or not, it’s going to happen. Security is driving it.”
He advises VARs to look beyond only providing EMV-enabled solutions. “If you don’t start to bring to your clients total solutions that embed wireless and security alongside EMV, there are other partners who are thinking about this.”
John Waldron, president for Honeywell Scanning and Mobility, says the requirement to have EMV-enabled solutions could mean your customers have less to spend on other IT projects. “The IT environment has so many dollars to spend over a given period,” Waldron explains, “(EMV) is probably going to take attention from a capital standpoint, and a capacity standpoint, away from your customers that they normally spend on other things, whether that's infrastructure deployment, whether that’s mobile POS, or other things.”
“As a retail-focused industry, it would be important to think about this to understand that if you don’t have a practice capable of supporting customers and helping them move forward in payment encryption technology, are you going to get left out, and is your business going to suffer?” he asks.
Arnie Bellini, CEO, ConnectWise, says EMV could be a wedge to providing a managed service. “That’s the biggest opportunity that there is — the fact that it is a capital expenditure. That’s why I believe that the movement to EMV is the best opportunity for you to go to those customers and say, ‘Hey, look, let’s talk about the big, new capital investment. Let’s just talk about a monthly operating expense instead.’ That's the big opportunity.”
RetailNOW 2014, hosted by the Retail Solutions Providers Association (RSPA), was conducted Aug. 3-6 at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Orlando, FL. For more information on the event, go to www.BSMinfo.com/solution/InsideRSPA.