Metric "Aura" EMV equipped Pay-and-Display machine

Although much of the publicity surrounding EMV “Chip and PIN” migration has related to its use in retail outlets, another market sector that has benefitted from EMV migration is Unattended Payment Terminals (UPT).

Unattended payments, where a customer uses an unsupervised terminal to pay for goods or services such as parking and vending machines or self-service kiosks, have traditionally been processed using cash. Where card payment has been supported this has been achieved by using the data from the magnetic stripe on a customer’s card, with no cardholder verification. This means that such machines are an obvious target for fraudsters trying to use stolen and cloned cards and, as there are no attendants to monitor these environments, it has been extremely difficult to crackdown on this illegal activity. This has therefore limited the growth of unattended card payments.

However, the advent of EMV cards means that secure PIN entry can now be used to verify the cardholder, and advances in communications technology means that it is also possible to quickly and safely authorise transactions with the card issuer even when there is no fixed communications infrastructure on site.

Together, these developments have fuelled a large growth in a number of unattended environments, including car parking, transport ticketing, automated supermarket lanes and other self-service kiosks vending higher value goods, as vendors can now have confidence that every transaction is genuine and they will always receive their payment.

This is just one example of the benefits that EMV migration can bring. The CreditCall EMV Kernels provide a simple but powerful way to add EMV Level 2 capability to payment devices. Check out www.emvx.co.uk for further details of these EMV Level 2 Kernels.