In the late 90s Visa, MasterCard and Europay rolled out a global initiative for making credit and debit payments using smart cards. Known as the EMV standard, it has been seen as one of the most effective tools in fighting card fraud worldwide. The EMV standard defines many aspects of smart card deployment, including the visual appearance of a card, terminal hardware and software, personalisation, cryptography, transaction processing algorithms, etc. Today, 42% of all global payment cards and almost 76% of all terminals use the EMV payment standard. This means that 1.3 billion EMV cards and over 20 million EMV terminals are now in circulation (EMVCo, EMV deployment figures for Q3 2011).

Migration to the EMV solution, however, is not simple. Amongst other factors, upgrading the authorization host, terminal network and card personalization system in order to handle the EMV card could pose a great technological and budgetary challenge.

In order to ease the burden of EMV migration, Compass Plus offers an inexpensive EMV compliance solution for card issuers and acquirers. EMV Empowerment Toolkit has been designed with affordability and ease of implementation as its primary objectives. The solution’s most unique and valuable feature is the ability to work together with the existing magstripe card management system, ensuring the implementation requires either minimal changes to the existing system, or in certain scenarios - none at all. EMV Empowerment Toolkit manages all EMV-specific transaction parameters with the remaining data handled by the existing card management solution in the usual way. There is no need to migrate the card/customer base already in place, therefore avoiding costly integration and migration scenarios. Upon the implementation of EMV Empowerment Toolkit, the legacy magstripe card management system will continue to manage the issuance of cards as if they were still magnetic stripe, whilst the Toolkit will enable the EMV component: from online transaction processing, including the appropriate cryptography, to data preparation, profile management, issuer script management and clearing data handling – all running transparently for the legacy environment.

EMV Empowerment Toolkit provides a simple phased upgrade of the existing processing facilities ensuring incremental migration to the EMV compliant solution with a much more bearable financial impact.

For more information, please go to our EMV white paper and EMV website