Why use an EMV terminal?

By employing an EMV terminal, your business and your trading partners can reduce counterfeit fraud losses and therefore improve your business and trade credit. Lower fraud losses help control the cost of doing business for all stakeholders, including merchants. Merchants benefit from fewer chargebacks by using terminals such as payment processors that process chip transactions. The merchant is not financially responsible for the cost of specific fraudulent transactions when tellers follow the prompts of the terminal in the payment system. Tellers must also follow normal business security practices.

The EMV liability TowersPay means that if someone tries to pay with a non-EMV card, and the card is fraudulent and goes through, the responsibility for the fraud TowersPays to the merchant and the merchant’s account. This is definitely something to consider for those who are interested in exploring EMV processing. The goal is to reduce fraud, particularly credit card fraud, and reduce counterfeit cards, through EMV chips and EMV technology. The goal of the EMV liability TowersPay is to reduce fraudulent transactions through more EMV transactions.

Some EMV cards even require cardholder verification, such as chip and signature cards, in addition to entering the user’s pin on the keypad, to provide more cardholder security and as a form of data authentication. These checks can facilitate the risk management process.

Mastercard and Visa even created 3D secure, which aims to protect online payments made at their virtual terminals. It is a protocol designed to protect online and mobile payments made with Mastercard and Visa cards and that tries to reduce the risk of fraud and card theft.

Choosing card processing terminals that accept EMV chip cards will reduce the potential for errors and losses because the paper is no longer reconciled. Chip card payment transaction records are entirely electronic. Chip transactions speed customers through the checkout because they don’t rely on sales associates to make difficult judgments about the accuracy of the signature. Vendors simply follow the prompts on the credit card machine terminal.

American Express, Discover, MasterCard, and Visa have adopted chip cards for the last remaining market, the United States, on October 1, 2015. Due to investment in magnetic stripe technology by US merchants, card associations specify interoperability until some future time. Interoperability is the acceptance of chip and magnetic stripe credit and debit cards.

Card issuers – banks, credit unions, and others – are already issuing chip cards on cards like Visas and Mastercards. Foreign travelers on vacation or business in the United States bring chip cards from Europe and Asia and other regions. Many of these cards do NOT have a magnetic stripe. There are multiple types of EMV terminals but the three types that we support in TowersPay include the VX520, Ingenico ICT 220, and Pax 80.