EMV Compliance

The card associations require that POS-terminals have to be EMV compliant. The abbreviation EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, Visa and endorses an international credit card standard which is based on modern chip card technology.

Since the launch of the EMV Compliance standard for Maestro, MasterCard and Visa (companies that first created the standard) more and more cards are equipped with EMV chip card in addition to the common magnetic stripe. The chip is more forgery-proofed than the magnetic stripe which reduces the fraudulent risk through stolen or lost chip cards. Two major benefits of smart-card-based credit card payment systems that stand out are improved security and the possibility to control “offline” credit-card transactions.

The most common EMV standard chip implementations are VIS – Visa, MasterCard chip – MasterCard, AEIPS – American Express, UICS – China Union Pay, J Smart – JCB, D-PAS – Discover/Diners Club International.

Benefits of EMV compliant POS terminals:

1. Increased security for cashless payments
2. Principle liability shift by using EMV compatible terminal
3. Reduction of fraudulent risk of stolen or lost cards
4. PIN authorization by credit card payments possible