Bridging Mobile POS And EMV

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies

As the EMV liability shift gets closer, VARs should work to prepare merchants to support this new payment type in mobile POS and other solutions.

Two key events stand to make POS security more complex this year: the adoption of mobile POS solutions and the impending October 2015 Europay, MasterCard, and VISA (EMV)-related “liability shift.” Merchants who have not deployed contact chip technology at the point of sale will take on additional liability for counterfeit transactions if a chip could have prevented the fraud.

According to the vendors interviewed for this story, the biggest security threats continue to come from hackers or others who are trying to obtain or tamper with cardholder data. “Nearly every single payment security breach over the last few years involved data being stored or transmitted unencrypted within the merchant’s payment system and usually involved the front-end POS solution,” says Shan Ethridge, vice president and general manager, North American financial services group, Verifone. “Without a doubt merchants need to find a way to support electronic payments without capturing card information within the POS system itself.”