Elavon, a leading global payments provider and subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp (USB), now offers EMV with its Simplify payment application.
The application is pre-certified for EMV prior to the October 1, 2015 liability shift deadline, when non-EMV-enabled businesses and card issuers will assume responsibility for any fraud that occurs.
EMV, or “Europay MasterCard Visa,” is a globally accepted card standard that uses an embedded microchip to provide unique data protection when the card is inserted into a chip-card reader. The Smart Card Alliance estimates that 45 percent of the world’s payment cards (outside of the U.S.) are currently chip enabled, and card use in the U.S. is expected to exceed 76 percent by 2016.
Certification requires businesses to provide adequate EMV coding via an acquirer for all payment elements, including the PIN-enabled device, point of sale (POS) terminal, payment gateway and third party processor as well as for each card scheme.
“The industry has reached a critical point where businesses can no longer avoid having security measures in place to keep them safe from fraud and data breaches,” said Marianne Johnson, Elavon’s global executive vice president of product and innovation. “Having a pre-certified solution gives us the opportunity to help reduce the complexity of implementing EMV as well as enable value added resellers, agents and solution providers to accelerate their efforts.”
Simplify is a software application that resides within a payment terminal that is integrated with a customer’s current POS or Property Management System (PMS). The application uses a layered approach to security that combines encryption, tokenization and EMV to mitigate vulnerabilities while cardholder data is in-transit, in-use and at-rest. Simplify securely encrypts card data and sends the transaction to Elavon’s Fusebox Gateway, where a token is created and returned to the payment terminal. Concurrently, the EMV-enabled application uses advanced algorithms contained on a CHIP card to authenticate that the card is not counterfeit when it’s used at the payment terminal. Within seconds, sensitive cardholder data is easily isolated from a business’s payment system and the card is verified as legitimate.
White Castle, a family-owned business that owns and operates more than 400 restaurants in 12 states in the U.S., recognized the prevalence of restaurant data breaches and recently integrated Elavon’s Simplify application to proactively reduce threats of cardholder data theft (Click here to download the White Castle case study).
“Because Elavon’s advanced payments security removes card data from our POS systems, our PCI efforts are greatly reduced. We project saving at least 50 percent in terms of PCI validation costs and resource consumption,” said Randy Embree, director of information technology for White Castle.
Experience Overseas Helped U.S. EMV Implementation
According to a recent Mercator Advisory Group report, savings from counterfeit fraud prevention across all issuers could total as much as $700 million in the U.S. annually. Implementing a layered approach to security is an industry best practice based on lessons learned from other countries. A leading acquirer around the world, Elavon has implemented EMV strategies for businesses in Europe, Canada and Puerto Rico.
Johnson added, “The most important thing we learned from our EMV rollout efforts in other countries is that businesses must be vigilant in fraud protection because criminals will continue to evolve their tactics. While EMV is not a silver bullet, it is an integral part of the multi-layered approach to security we have today.”