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.

An EMV card generates a unique “Authorisation Request Cryptogram” for each transaction that requires online authorisation. This is calculated by encrypting the card and transaction data using a secret key that is known only to the card and the card issuer. When the transaction details are sent to the issuer during the authorisation process, the issuer can then use its copy of the secret key to verify that the cryptogram for the transaction is correct, and that therefore the card is genuine.

Once the issuer is satisfied that the request is genuine and they wish to authorise the transaction, they will generate an authorisation response cryptogram, which the card can then use to authenticate that the authorisation for the payment came from the genuine issuer of the card.

These checks allow the EMV card and the issuer to verify the authenticity of each other, and thus protect the cardholder from being debited for fraudulent transactions.

This is just one of the many benefits that EMV migration can bring. The CreditCall EMV kernels provide a simple but powerful way to add EMV level 2 to ATMs, PoS devices and unattended payment terminals such as kiosks.

Check out www.emvx.co.uk for further details of these EMV Level 2 Kernels.