The Point of Sale News: Cognizant’s Assistant Vice President of Retail Consulting Says Adopting EMV is a Requirement, not a Choice

“EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, is slated to be mandated across the United States starting in October 2015 and automated fuel dispensers have until October 2017 to comply,” reminds Karl Swensen. “By accepting chip card transactions, merchants and issuers should see a reduction in fraud. To further strengthen an organization’s fraud prevention initiatives, transactions need to incorporate end-to-end encryption coupled with tokenization.” Excerpts from the article:

“Given the significant barriers to EMV adoption, it may be tempting for merchants to meet minimum requirements for accepting EMV payments. However, medium to large retailers should also consider the bigger picture of customer security and peace of mind. Some key critical success factors for a payment initiative of this size include: Stakeholder identification, cost benefit analysis, phased approach, business continuity architecture, resilience testing, and proactive monitoring alerts.

Organizations should adopt a five-step approach to implement a secure, robust and industry-leading payment solution: end to end data encryption, EMV, tokenization, payment gateway, and settlement, funding and reconciliation.

Card fraud is on the rise in the U.S., and merchants are the primary target for stealing information. With the EMV deadline just over a year away, the responsible retailer must take steps to prepare now. Although EMV implementation might seem overwhelming to merchants, they should start their journey to secure payments rather than wait for a looming deadline. Solutions such as data encryption and tokenization should be used in combination with EMV to implement a robust payment solution to better protect merchants against fraud. By proactively adopting EMV payment solutions, merchants can stay ahead of the regulatory curve and better protect their customers from fraud.”

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