DULUTH, Ga. -- As retailers await the numerous pieces that have yet to come together to deploy EMV-security measures, consumer-transaction company NCR Corp. announced that it has received EMV certification from First Data Corp. for its Epsilon payments application.
NCR Epsilon is a site-based payment-processing application that has been providing multiple-host online and offline payment processing for the retail industry since 1999. The certification from Atlanta-based First Data enables Epsilon to process credit and debit EMV (Europay MasterCard Visa) transactions for both the Radiant POS and StorePoint POS solutions.
Providing a larger perspective, Gray Taylor, executive director of technology standards organization Conexxus, Arlington, Va., said certifications remain a large obstacle for c-store operators as they work to attain EMV compliance.
“Everyone is slogging through EMV,” Taylor told CSP Daily News.
In general, the process of certification tests two different systems repeatedly to make sure they consistently work well together, but it’s not the only challenge. Taylor said payment devices have to achieve speed optimization, which means the transaction times don’t get too much longer than what most customers are used to. Retailers such as Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart had more than a dozen iterations of its model before achieving an EMV transaction time about three seconds faster than card-swipe transactions, he said.
With that in mind, he said he believes most convenience stores are not EMV-compliant even with point-of-sale (POS) registers inside the store--that's surprising, considering the credit-card liability-shift date passed last October. The shift date for in-pump POS compliance is October 2017.
In the meantime, providers such as NCR and First Data move forward. “The EMV liability shift will continue to influence convenience-store strategies,” said Jason Groff, director of petroleum and convenience retail for NCR, Duluth, Ga. “With our certification for Epsilon, First Data customers now can reliably move to EMV and provide their shoppers with more secure payment transactions.”
The certified Epsilon solution will be delivered as a software upgrade to RPOS and StorePoint customers.
NCR specializes in consumer-transaction technologies. With its software, hardware and portfolio of services, NCR enables more than 550 million transactions daily across retail, financial, travel, hospitality, telecom and technology and small business. The company has more than 30,000 employees and does business in 180 countries.
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