EMV Certification Process

EMV liability shift is approaching but according to the statistics there are still a lot of businesses which need to undergo EMV certification. This certification is necessarily required for gateways, payment facilitators and companies that maintain their own payment ecosystems while many merchants can simply buy EMV terminals from the acquirers and not to work on the EMV certification. And those who have to undergo the certification need to know how to organize the process effectively.  

Three phases of the EMV certification process can be pointed out: preparatory, host integration and EMV certification. At the preparatory phase you need to make the decision about three components of the process: terminals which will be used to read the information from EMV cards, payment gateway software that will transmit the data to the acquirer and acquirers that will process transactions.

At the second phase you need to develop the integration code. The integration process is similar to classical integration, but a proper massage format should be implemented to enable a payment gateway to submit EMV fields to acquirer’s system in a format which is required by this system. No certification fees should be paid.

And the third phase can be called EMV certification. At this stage an EMV terminal and an EMV toolkit are used. Special test scripts are executed with the help of the EMV toolkit. First the results are reviewed by the acquirer and then they are forwarder to the associations for the final approval. Usually an administrative fee ($2000 - $3000) is associated with this process.

So in order to undergo EMV certification successfully you need to plan everything carefully. There is not much time left so hope this information will be useful to you.  Some additional facts about EMV certification process can be found in the publication at #UniPayGateway.