EMV Compliance: Merchant Guide to Modernizing Your Payment System

The October 2015 deadline for merchants to achieve EMV compliance is long past, but we are far from a 100% EMV acceptance rate in the US. Only 19% of card-present transactions in 2016 were EMV (source). 2017 has been better, but there is still a long way to go.Don't believe it? Walk into most local stores, and you’ll likely be able to swipe your credit card, even if it has a chip, with no problem. EMV compliance is not yet standard.The challenge is that upgrading payment technology is not as easy as just flipping a switch. There is a lot to consider before upgrading to new payment technology and merchants are often too busy running the day-to-day operations of their businesses to spend the time to dive in.

EMV Compliance is not necessarily plug-and-play

Merchants must first understand their current infrastructure and network, their future needs and business goals, assess available technology, understand the impact of PCI compliance, acknowledge the business workflow impact of a new checkout process and much more. Fully understanding EMV compliance is more complicated than companies have been making it out to be.With this in mind, we set out to bring some transparency to the EMV upgrade process by creating an actionable step-by-step guide that merchants (and agents) can use to start this process and better understand their own needs.We collaborated with industry experts, ETA and Discover, to ensure we were delivering a comprehensive guide to the people that needed it. Here's a sneak peak:

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Get the step-by-step guide to ensuring proper EMV compliance

The final product, Merchant Guide to Modernizing your Payment System, is intended to help merchants upgrade their point-of-sale payment system to support chip card acceptance and achieve EMV compliance. The objective is to be a hands-on guide for facilitating discussions between the merchant service provider (MSP), the processor, and the dealer to provide solutions for in-store card-present transactions. We start with a recap on EMV or chip card acceptance which is a “must” for any terminal system to be considered modernized. We then outline best practices, which includes information related to data security applicable to chip card transactions consisting of tokenization, encryption, and PCI data security standards. Then, a guide covering six steps is offered to assist with the POS system transition – from reviewing the current payments system to training employees.Here is the full table of contents for the guide:

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: EMV Recap
• What is EMV and why is it important?
• How does chip technology make payments more secure
• Cardholder verification methods
• Chapter 2: Best practices for Modernizing your payment System
• Start planning early
• Understand your needs when discussing options with your MSP or payment processor
• Do you need to get your system certified?
• Chapter 3: Step-by-step guide for your business
• Review your current payments infrastructure
• Determine your goals and what you want from your new POS hardware/software
• Discuss options with your merchant services and/or payment processor
• Install your new POS acceptance hardware
• EMV & PCI Compliance - will EMV make you PCI compliant?
• Train your employees and customers

Interested in reading more? You can download the free guide, Merchant Guide to Modernizing your Payment System, here:

https://www.goboomtown.com/media/EMV-Compliance-Merchant-Discussion-Guide-2017.pdf

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