Tag: EMV | Page 2 | Infinicept

Kroger Details Its Fun-Filled Visa Negotiations

Have retailers suddenly started developing backbones, in terms of pushing back on payments companies? On Monday (June 27), Kroger sued Visa about how it was implementing EMV, in much the same way that Walmart and Home Depot have done. This follows Walmart kicking Visa out of Canada and a major German company rejecting PayPal after PayPal apologized and reinstated it. Did somebody spike the NRF water fountains with super-caffeine or something? Or have merchants decided that they can push back on payments giants with little risk of meaningful pain?

EMV rules seems to have been the PIN straw that broke the POS camel’s back, as even Apple Pay has suffered performance degradations following EMV migrations. The big picture arguments about security—that it’s blindingly obvious that PIN is far more secure than signature—are obscured by the reality that this is really a fight about interchange fees. And the EMV argument that the path to PIN must be glacially slow or else American consumers will freak out from the change, despite the fact that most are quite used to PINs from ATMs and debit cards, is frighteningly valid. And here it is in the land of EMV rules that grocery giant Kroger makes it stand.

EMV Really Screwing Up Apple Pay

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when EMV data we receive. As more major retail chains fully accept EMV payments, Apple Pay is being dealt some serious experience setbacks, such as being asked twice for price verification and being asked for fingerprint biometric authentication and then, a few screens later, a signature. Neither of those steps were part of the Apple Pay process until merchants switched on EMV.

To be clear, those time-wasting moves are not part of the Apple Pay process at all, but are superimposed after the Apple Pay transaction is complete and customers think they are done. The reason this is now happening is due to very strict interpretations of EMV rules—and the fact that the nature of the payment mechanism (beyond that it’s contactless) is not always communicated to the POS. Hence, it must assume the worst. When two retailers—Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods–last week made the switch through upgraded Verifone POS terminals, customers used to speedy Apple Pay experiences were literally being called back to the checkout lane to complete the additional keystrokes. Before, once Apple Pay’s screen said “done” and displayed an animated checkmark, they were free to leave. Not so in an EMV world.

Visa’s Quick Chip EMV Move, Banking On Perception To Trump Reality

Using the Electronic Transaction Association’s TRANSACT 16 event as a backdrop, Visa on Tuesday (April 19) rolled out Quick Chip for EMV, which the leading card brand described in a news release as being “a technology enhancement that optimizes EMC chip processing and speeds up checkout times.” Unfortunately, Quick Chip isn’t a technology enhancement nor does it optimize chip processing and it certainly doesn’t speed up checkout times. Other than that, the lead of Visa’s news release got it right.

What Quick Chip, however, does do is potentially just as powerful an aid to EMV—or quite destructive to EMV adoption, depending on who is talking—as what Visa claims. All that it does is allow the shopper to remove the card from the card reader much more quickly than current deployments permit. Given that the reader’s retention of the card until the full transaction is complete is behind a very high percentage of both merchant and consumer EMV complaints, this could be seen as a very good thing. Let’s break this down. For almost all transactions, the Quick Chip change won’t accelerate the total transaction time at all. The customer still needs to stand there until all products have scanned and the cashier has been given the final transaction approval. Therefore, from the merchant perspective of “how many shoppers can I push through the line in an hour?” this change is unlikely to help at all. But like so much of what happens in retail, reality never stands a chance against perception.

Class Action Merchant EMV Lawsuit Could Make The EMV Transition A Lot Messier

EMV has always delivered more than its fair share of headaches and surprises—and this week even has the MasterCard CEO doing some EMV griping of his own—but a class action lawsuit filed last week is raising yet another troubling EMV question. Is the liability shift appropriate if merchants have done everything in their power to embrace EMV? If backlogs from the card brands are why a merchant doesn’t have an EMV greenlight, is it fair to punish them with the liability shift?

Like every payments issue, there are details to be dealt with. Did the merchant submit all paperwork in a reasonable timeframe? One can’t file 10 minutes before the deadline and then blame the backlog for a lack of approval.
Still, it’s an interesting question. And the lawsuit from B&R Supermarkets and Grove Liquors goes further than saying that the backlog was unexpected or larger than expected. The filing accuses the card brands—and other payments players—of deliberately being slow, in an attempt to push off liability costs on as many merchants as possible, regardless of their EMV efforts.

PCI Council’s New EMV Payment Token Rules Are Worth Reading Closely

The PCI Council in late December rolled out its security rules for token service providers for EMV payment tokens, which overwhelmingly deals with mobile transactions. Today, the card brands handle the vast majority of tokens issued, but the council expects that to sharply change now that EMVCo has released the specification. Given the importance of tokens to payment facilitators, it’s worth a read.

One of the fun things that this document does, in pure PCI Council fashion, is deliver more acronyms. Yes, these are brand acronyms. (No, no need to thank them.) One is TDE, for Token Data Environment. An important term—not an acronym yet, sadly—is Payment Token Data, which has a very specific definition: “Covers a number of discrete data elements, including the Payment Token and related data as defined in the EMV Payment Tokenisation Specification Technical Framework, which include the Payment Token Expiry Date, Payment Token Requestor ID, Payment Token Assurance Level and Payment Token Assurance Data.”

MCX Finally Gets Its Interchange Break—After Chase Hands It To Them

When JPMorgan Chase on Monday (Oct. 26) promised new mobile capabilities for its online Chase Pay program next summer, it chose to take a decidedly retailer-oriented approach. With the lures of lower interchange fees plus all of the fraud cost protections of the EMV liability shift without having to accept EMV, Chase has given retailers concrete reasons to push Chase Pay over other payment methods.

The Chase announcement named MCX (and specifically members Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Shell) as premier partner. Interestingly, the interchange reduction effort that caused MCX to form years ago but had been all but abandoned by the group recently is the centerpiece of Chase’s 2016 plans. What MCX couldn’t get on their own was handed to them by Chase.

Why Did Most Merchants Miss The EMV Deadline? Many Reasons, But Complexity Is The Top

With the liability shift and October already here, where are all the EMV-compliant merchants? Many are still waiting for software updates. And why is that, given how many years everyone has known about the October 2015 cutover? Seems that the U.S. payments processing space is a lot more complicated than even the payment itself realized, according to Randy Vanderhoof, who, as executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, is the industry’s chief EMV cheerleader.

Vanderhoof concedes that most U.S. merchants—60-65 percent, he said—are not EMV compliant today and he blames that on several factors, but payments complexity—and good old-fashioned procrastination—are at the top of his list. “The U.S. market is the most complex payments processing market in the world because we have multiple parties involved in managing the retail POS systems and multiple parties engaged in the processing and acquiring of payment transactions,” Vanderhoof said. “In other countries, other markets, the major banks who were then issuers were also the acquirers so they owned the terminals in those merchant locations. They invested in the cards and the terminals and their own banking acquiring network. In the U.S., financial institutions are separated from the merchants and acquirers. This means that there needs to be independent investments and alignments.”

Financial Futility: Why Chip & PIN Sucks For Small Merchants

Given the huge importance of small merchants in the U.S. (especially one-location shops, which account for overwhelmingly more retail locations than any other merchant size segment), it’s impressive how little attention has been paid to how inappropriate chip and PIN is for those merchants.

In the wake of the U.S. EMV liability shift that kicked in on October 1, there’s been no shortage of debate about Chip and PIN vs. Chip and Signature. Once again, our old friend, the Durbin Amendment, is having its say. And for all the high-minded security-oriented thoughts being dished out, along with the many biased special interests trying to influence the debate, the small and micro-merchant have been left out, as usual.