If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably heard about the growing importance of EMV chip card technology in payment processing. Chip cards represent a shift towards better security in retail, and they can greatly benefit your business.
What exactly is EMV chip technology? EMV stands for “Europay, MasterCard, and Visa.” You may have noticed that your new credit cards have little silver or gold chips in them. Those chips make cards EMV compliant. When consumers use chip cards to pay for goods, they insert the chip-end of the card into the front-end of payment terminals and type in a PIN number. This is more secure than swiping bar strips because chip cards are more difficult to counterfeit and require secondary PIN authentication.Why chip technology matters for your business
In recent years, North American retail has made a gradual shift towards chip card payment processing as a way to guard against chargebacks. It turns out that magnetic card strips and signatures are a bit too easy to forge. In the past, banks absorbed the cost of chargebacks, limiting merchants of liability when fraudsters used stolen credit cards.The shift towards chip cards is especially important for U.S. merchants, who tend to own their payment PIN pads as opposed to renting them. While upgrading PIN pads may be costly, since October 2015, U.S. merchants are liable for fraudulent card purchases processed over non-EMV PIN pads.This means that if some ne’er-do-well uses a bogus card to buy $40 worth of goods, the store owner could be fully on the hook to cover that $40 loss. Upgrading to EMV chip card PIN pads is important because doing so limits business owners from liability over chargebacks.An easy transition to chip technology
Transitioning to chip card PIN pads might intimidate some business owners as many industry vendors are still in the midst of transition and changing payment processors can be a hassle. Then there’s the task of ensuring that your Point of Sale system actually works with said PIN pads. But fear not, because ACE Retail Point of Sale software offers integration with EMV-compliant payment PIN pads, you have the security of solid PCI-compliant chip card technology and the ability to transact with 9 different EMV payment processors so that you can select the one that best meets the needs of your business. It also spares you the pain of duplicate work and potential errors that result from having to manually input sales information from your PIN pad into your Point of Sale system.ACE Retail users in North America have access to a wide selection of payment processors including CHASE Paymentech, Vantiv, Mercury, Moneris, FirstData, GlobalPayments, etc. As of May 2016, ACE Retail software is now integrated via the following EMV PIN pads:
For more information on how ACE Retail chip card integration can benefit your business, call ACE POS Solutions toll-free at 1.885.660.2555 or drop us an email at info@acepos-solutions.com.