Beyond Chip-And-PIN: The Future Of Retail Payments

By Brendan O’Meara, Senior Director, Worldwide Retail and Consumer Goods, Microsoft on November 22, 2016

Securing consumer payment data continues to dominate the retail industry’s agenda. A recent “The State of Retail Payments 2016” study by the National Retail Federation and Forrester showed that reducing credit and debit card fraud by implementing the new Europay, Mastercard, and Visa (EMV) chip card standards was its top payment challenge this past year. But it also found retailers busy with new data security enhancements.

With the one-year anniversary of the EMV mandate now behind us, I sat down with FreedomPay, a leader in commerce payments technology, to discuss where we are and where we’re headed with retail payment security. Sharing insights and best practices, I spoke with Chris Kronenthal, one of the industry’s preeminent payment security experts and FreedomPay’s chief technology officer, and Tom Smith, vice president of marketing.

Here are the highlights of our conversation.

So, let’s start with EMV chip card acceptance. Where are things now?

This year, retailers made a lot of progress in their transition to EMV. They also improved customer service challenges considerably, bringing the transaction times back to the two to three seconds that consumers are used to.

By the end of the year, the bulk of EMV-related learning will have happened. And while there will still be remaining installations and updates that need to take place, most retailers can, and already are, shifting their focus back to addressing the broader issues of security and beginning to look again at innovations like integrated commerce and value-added services.

To read the complete interview click here.