How VARs Can Benefit From EMV Adoption

By Gennifer Biggs, Business Solutions magazine.

Deliver clear business value by guiding POS customers along the fastest path to accepting chip-based credit cards.

There’s a big opportunity staring you down today if you’re an IT solutions provider with experience in point of sale (POS) technology. Any of your customers that accept credit cards as a payment option are scrambling to prepare their POS systems for a huge impending change in payment security — EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa). Most of the world already has made the conversion to EMV, defined by EMVCo.com as a “set of specifications for smart-card payments and acceptance devices, developed to ensure interoperability between chip-based payment cards and terminals.” Most of Europe, Mexico, Brazil, and Japan accept chip and PIN cards today, and another 50 countries are in the midst of migrating, according to the Smart Card Alliance. So while 45% of the payment cards in circulation and 76% of global POS terminals accept EMV payments, the U.S. is still preparing for the switch.