Don’t Skip the Chip, Get A PCI Validated Solution Today

The payment terminal beeps at a customer after she inserts her chip card into the slot on the bottom of the reader. The cashier has to tell her to swipe the card instead, in the latest case of what seems like the zillionth person to get it wrong.

You can’t blame the customer or the cashier for the confusion. A year after the liability shift of October 2015, there’s still a high level of inconsistency in the deployment of EMV acceptance among merchants. To accept the new chip cards, merchants must use EMV certified terminals by the major card processors and the card issuers, like Visa and MasterCard and replace their outdated payment devices.

But the reluctance to pay for updated payment devices and longer-than-expected certification processes have slowed the transition to what was supposed to be a more secure way to accept payments. And, it’s ironic that some merchants haven’t begun accepting EMV-enabled cards for fear of slowing down checkout lanes.

As promised, those merchants who didn’t make the transition to the EMV standard are seeing higher fraud chargebacks from the card brands showing up in their statements.

More than a year later, many merchants are behind the curve to secure cardholder data. What should they be concentrating on to catch up?

The key is to understand the three layers of the card data security environment. EMV is only one of those layers. The PCI Security Standards Council recommends that merchants also integrate Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) and Tokenization. FreedomPay’s Commerce Platform offers a turnkey solution that incorporates all three layers and is integrated into most major point-of-sale and property management systems, making implementation simple and seamless.

The FreedomPay Commerce Platform is a PCI validated, all-in-one solution for EMV, P2PE and Tokenization. It’s fully certified with the major card processors, so deploying the solution with Ingenico’s certified payment devices eliminates the need for merchants to undergo their own EMV certification. It’s a turnkey solution that saves time, money, and eliminates the swipe or dip dilemma at the checkout.

One of the key benefits of FreedomPay’s platform is the fact that it’s already validated. If a merchant uses another non-validated solution, the merchant is still liable to meet stricter PCI DSS requirements.

To address customer desire for faster checkouts, the solution also enables NFC mobile wallet payments such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay.

So far, more than half of the payment cards in the U.S. have been upgraded to chip cards, with the card brands predicting that number will be much closer to 100% by the end of 2017. With chip cards in hand, consumers will expect merchants to be able to accept them to provide higher levels of security.

Merchants, particularly smaller merchants, shouldn’t undertake the EMV certification process on their own. It can take a lot longer and cost a lot more than expected and without P2PE and tokenization, the data is not as secure as consumers and merchants assume it to be.

Merchants of all sizes can use the FreedomPay Commerce Platform for an omni-channel card security solution for both card-present and card-not-present transactions, by using our Hosted Payment Page for e-commerce and a Virtual Terminal solution for call center transactions.

To learn more about complete card payments security solutions, click here.