When there are multiple payment applications present on an EMV card, or the card configuration requires cardholder confirmation, payment terminals will display the list of applications to the cardholder to allow them to select an EMV application to use for the transaction.

EMV cards will often include an ‘application preferred name’, which is the name of the card application in the cardholder’s local language. Although this is the preferred name to display to the cardholder, it will not always be possible to do so as the name may use an ‘issuer code table’ that is not supported by the terminal. For example,  a terminal in Europe may not contain a display font that allows Arabic characters to be displayed.

Therefore, normally all EMV card applications will contain an ‘application label’ which contains only characters in the common character set that all EMV-capable terminals are required to support, which should ensure that there will always be a name that can be displayed to the cardholder.

Unfortunately, although the presence of the application label on the EMV card is mandatory when using the PSE directory method during application selection, it was only defined as optional when selecting the application using the list of Applications method. Therefore  it has never been possible to guarantee the presence of the application label on a chip card – until now! EMVCo have finally resolved this by issuing Specification Update Bulletin No. 71 that now makes the application label mandatory on all new EMV-compliant cards. This will finally mean that EMV Level 2 Kernels used by payment terminal vendors will always have a name to display during application selection, and should no longer need to implement default name processing.

The CreditCall EMV kernels are compliant with all the latest industry requirements, and provide a simple but powerful way to add EMV Level 2 compliance to payment devices. Check out www.emvx.co.uk for further details of these EMV Level 2 Kernels.