How Semi-Integrated Solutions Can Help Your Merchant IT Clients — And You — With EMV Migration

By Bernadette Wilson

The U.S. is in the process of the migration to EMV. There is less than five months until the October 1 liability shift — when liability for fraudulent payment card transactions shifts to the party with the least EMV-compliant technology. Some of your merchant IT clients or prospects, particularly SMB merchants, could be at the very beginning of the process to adopt EMV technology.

If you are looking for a way to shorten the timeline for those merchants while providing a solution that helps protect card data, the answer could be a semi-integrated system. 

Patty Walters, SVP of EMV corporate strategy for Vantiv and vice chair of the 2015-16 EMV Migration Forum Steering Committee, says, simply put, with a semi-integrated architecture, if a criminal hacks into a POS system trying to find sensitive payment card data, there isn’t any data there to find.

Walters explains with an integrated solution, the PIN pad or signature pad connects to the point of sale (POS), which is connected to merchant’s network and then to an acquirer or a gateway to the acquirer. With a semi-integrated solution, the infrastructure is still in place, but sensitive card data doesn’t flow through the POS. Instead the POS provides the amount of the sale to the PIN or signature pad, which is connected directly to the acquirer or the middleware to the acquirer.

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