January 12th, 2017 by Elma Jane
Accepting non-cash payments from your customers are valuable. If you don’t, you will miss out on sales; because of the growing numbers of customers who only carry plastic or wish to pay online. Today, you have many payment solution options.
Credit Card Terminals – you might remember the beginning of the credit card era and i’ts evolution with today’s countertop terminals. From the traditional swipe of their credit, debit or even gift card to make a purchase to today’s modern terminals. Like accepting EMV chip cards (to be in compliance with a PCI mandate) and NFC payments like Apple Pay.
Beyond the basics; these systems are generally supported by reporting sites that can help you monitor sales, and assist you with maintaining customer loyalty programs.
E-Commerce Solutions – online sales are growing every year. If you are considering an expansion of your business online; you need a complete hosted payment solution for transactions in all payment environments. Including in-store, back office mail/telephone order (MO/TO), mobile and e-commerce, that make your customers’ experience as intuitive and efficient as possible.
Point of Sale Systems – smart registers have evolved into high-tech point-of-sale (POS) systems due to technology advances. Not only taking customer payments; but it can transform your business with an advanced marketing programs, inventory management and sales and profitability tracking and reporting. Over the past years these advanced systems have become cost-effective and easy to use.
Wireless Terminals – in today’s hardware you have the option of accepting payments wirelessly, through a full-service terminal that is smaller than a countertop model, or through a mobile card reader plugin for a smartphone or tablet.
The advantage of a full-service wireless terminal is that it allows for receipt printing on the spot through the device and most modern full-service wireless terminals are EMV compliant and accept both EMV (chip card) and NFC payment types.
Call now 888-996-2273 and speak to our payment consultant to know which solution is best for you.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit Card Reader Terminal, e-commerce & m-commerce, EMV EuroPay MasterCard Visa, Mail Order Telephone Order, Near Field Communication, Payment Card Industry PCI Security, Point of Sale Tagged with: card reader, chip cards, credit card, debit, e-commerce, EMV, gift Card, mobile, moto, nfc, online, payment solution, payments, PCI, point of sale, smartphone, terminals, transactions
December 10th, 2015 by Elma Jane
WALMART LAUNCHES QR CODE MOBILE PAYMENTS SERVICE
Customers at US retail giant Walmart will soon be able to pay for purchases by scanning a QR code at the point of sale using Walmart Pay. Walmart Pay will be integrated into the Walmart app, the retailer’s own mobile payment service introduced in selected stores this month, with a nationwide launch expected in the first half of next year.
With this launch, Walmart becomes the only retailer to offer its own payment solution that works with any iOS or Android device, at any checkout lane, and with any major credit, debit, prepaid or Walmart gift card all through the Walmart mobile app.
Walmart Pay will allow for the integration of other mobile wallets in the future.
http://www.nfcworld.com/2015/12/10/340527/walmart-launches-qr-code-mobile-payments-service-in-the-us/
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Point of Sale Tagged with: credit, debit, gift Card, mobile payment, mobile payment service, mobile wallets, payment service, payment solution, point of sale, prepaid
September 4th, 2014 by Elma Jane
EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, and is slated to be mandated across the United States starting in October 2015 and automated fuel dispensers have until October 2017 to comply. Unlike magnetic swipe cards, EMV chip cards encrypt data and authenticate communication between the card and card reader. Additionally, chip card user is prompted for a PIN for authentication.
Why are those dates important? Companies lose $5.33 billion to fraud today, with card issuers and merchants incurring 63 and 37 percent of these losses, respectively. Under the EMV mandate, merchants who do not process chip cards will bear the burden of the issuer loss. By accepting chip card transactions, merchants and issuers should see a reduction in fraud.
Overcoming Barriers to EMV Adoption
Given the significant barriers to EMV adoption, it may be tempting for merchants to meet minimum requirements for accepting EMV payments. However, medium to large retailers should also consider the bigger picture of customer security and peace of mind.
Some key critical success factors for a payment initiative of this size include:
Business Continuity Architecture: As with all payment systems, it is imperative to have the EMV system running at all times. The solution should preferably have Active-Active architecture across multiple data centers and have a low Recovery Point Objective (the point in time to which the systems and data must be recovered after an outage).
Cost Benefit Analysis: Take a top down approach and decide accordingly on the scope of the analysis. This will ensure that decisions on scope are made on basis of quantitative data and not just qualitative arguments.
Phased Approach: To overcome time or cost overage in a project of this scope and complexity, retailers should try using an iterative approach for development. The rollout can be divided into multiple releases of six to seven months, which will provide the opportunity to review, capture lessons learnt, and improve subsequent releases.
Proactive Monitoring Alerts: Considering the criticality of business function carried out by EMV, tokenization and payment gateway, a vigorous supervising environment must be defined to perform proactive and reactive monitoring. It should take into consideration the monitoring targets, tools, scope and methods. This will provide advance visibility to the failure points and better ensuring maximum system availability.
Resilience Testing: Typically in a software project, the testing is limited to the unit, integration, performance and user acceptance. However, due to the critical nature of the applications and systems involved, robust resiliency testing is vital. This will ensure that there are no single points of failure and the system remains available when running in error conditions.
Stakeholder Identification: This is a key step to ensure that you have varied perspectives from all departments and their support. It will keep your organization from being blindsided and reduce the risk of disagreements in later stages of the program. Key stakeholders should include Store Operations, Card Accounting, Loss Prevention, Contact Center and IT & Data Security.
Organizations should adopt a five step approach to implement a secure, robust and industry-leading payment solution:
Encryption – Point to point encryption will ensure card data is secure and encrypted from the point of capture to the processor. Usually, merchants use data encryption that is not point to point, rendering their organization vulnerable to data breaches. Software encryption is the most common form of encryption, as it is easily installed and quires little or no hardware upgrades; however, it is less secure, may expose encryption keys, and is prone to memory scanning attacks. Hardware encryption is considered more secure but requires more costly terminal upgrades. Hardware encryption is designed to self-destruct the keys if tampered, but is not well-defined as very limited headway has been made in this space.
Tokenization – Build a Card Data Environment (CDE) that will host a centralized card data storage solution. Only limited applications with firewall access and capability to mutually authenticate via certificates can access CDE and receive card data. The rest of the applications will have tokens which are random numbers. This architecture will ease the merchant’s burden with existing and emerging PCI Data Security Standards.
Payment Gateway – Perform a risk assessment on the current payment gateway and identify gaps in functionality, manageability, compliance, scalability, speed to market and best practices. Determine the alternatives to mitigate the risks. Some of the important aspects of a leading payment gateway solution are support for all forms of credit, debit, gift cards and check transactions. Its ability to work with any acquirer, in-built encryption abilities, support for settlement and reconciliation must also be kept into consideration.
Settlement, Funding and Reconciliation – A workflow-based system to handle chargebacks and the automation of chargeback processing will greatly reduce labor-intensive work and enhance the quality of data used for settlement and reconciliation. Upgrades to the existing receipt retrieval system may be needed.
Card fraud is on the rise in the U.S., and merchants are the primary target for stealing information. With the EMV deadline just over a year away, the responsible retailer must take steps to prepare now. Although EMV implementation might seem overwhelming to merchants, they should start their journey to secure payments rather than wait for a looming deadline. Solutions such as data encryption and tokenization should be used in combination with EMV to implement a robust payment solution to better protect merchants against fraud. By proactively adopting EMV payment solutions, merchants can stay ahead of the regulatory curve and better protect their customers from fraud.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit Card Security, EMV EuroPay MasterCard Visa, Payment Card Industry PCI Security, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: authentication, automation, card, card data, Card Data Environment, card fraud, card issuers, card transactions, CDE, chargeback, chargeback processing, check, check transactions, chip, chip cards, credit, customer, customer security, data, data breaches, data encryption, data security, debit, EMV, emv chip cards, EuroPay, fraud, gateway, Gift Cards, host, integration, magnetic swipe cards, MasterCard, Merchant's, payment, payment gateway, payment solution, payment systems, PCI, PCI Data Security Standards, PIN, processor, retailers, Security, software, swipe, terminal, tokenization, tools, visa
