September 4, 2012
EMV is Coming – Don’t Panic!
Back in January, Shift4 CEO Dave Oder wrote an Executive Insight article about EMV (Chip and PIN) payments coming to the U.S. At that time, the details were a bit hazy and all we knew for certain was that by 2015, U.S. merchants were supposed to have EMV in place. Dave’s outlook on the situation was grim: “It’s going to be a mess.”
Today, it’s clear just how enormous an undertaking the EMV migration is going to be… and how it still isn’t going to solve most of the issues it was aimed at solving to begin with.
But, don’t worry too much; the good news we shared back in January is worth repeating:
In January, we encouraged you to wait for an end-to-end (or point-to-point) solution that would guarantee your future compatibility with U.S. EMV. At the time, we hadn’t yet released our solution, but we’re happy to announce that Shift4’s Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) solution is now being rolled out.
If you’re using another P2PE or E2EE solution, or have been considering implementing P2PE on top of our TrueTokenization®, now is the time to get on board. Contact [email protected] to add your name to the priority development list and get first dibs once the solution is up and running. Only Shift4 can provide tokenization and P2PE with absolute bank and processor independence. If you’re using another vendor’s P2PE solution, you will lose your transaction data if you ever need (or want) to change processors.
U.S. EMV implementation will be difficult, but if you make sure your systems are interfaced to Shift4 and are compliant, we’ll do all we can to make your transition as easy and painless as possible. Sure, merchants across the nation will have to add new devices – but, with any luck, that’ll be the only major step you have to take.