VelocIT Offers Integrated EMV & NFC For Sage100 Cloud
‘Tis the season for holiday shopping – and that means it’s also the season for credit card fraud. In response to rising holiday shopping fraud, consumers these days tend to be well educated about their options for disputing suspicious charges. However, the more charges that modern shoppers dispute, the more merchants like you may have to foot the bill for fraud.
After the many difficulties of 2020, merchants shouldn’t have to worry about covering the costs of fraudulent transactions too. Fortunately, there’s an easy, affordable way for you to protect your business from liability and you’ve probably heard of it: EMV chip cards.
What Is EMV?
EMV (an acronym for Europay, Mastercard, Visa) is a modern improvement to credit card technology. It was introduced to the U.S. market in 2011 and heavily promoted in 2015. Though less than 2/3 of America’s merchants were using EMV technology by December 2019 and the “chip card” technology still seems novel to U.S. consumers, the switch to EMV was long overdue here in the States.
After all, EMV tech has been around since the ‘80s and all the other major markets have been using it for decades.
So, what is it? In essence, EMV is the type of credit card that has a little chip embedded in it. Though the chip looks unassuming, that miniscule little piece of metal is actually a high-tech solution that dynamically creates a securely encrypted transaction code every time it is used.
When a customer “dips” (inserts) their card into an EMV terminal, the chip and the terminal work together to establish a secret password that makes the terminal able to read the financial data and complete the payment securely. The payment is so secure that EMV credit card data will be unintelligible to cybercriminals who may have breached your system.
Unlike magstripe technology, which is static and easy to counterfeit, EMV tech is dynamic and therefore much harder to counterfeit. In practical terms, this means that fraudsters are pretty darn unlikely to use a fake EMV card – which explains why Visa has seen counterfeit fraud reduced by 87% since chip card tech was introduced.
Why Use EMV Chip Cards?
Short answer: Chip cards can save merchants like you from being liable for fraudulent transactions.
Long answer: Let’s talk about the “liability shift.”
The liability shift refers to the industry transition that occurred in October 2015, in which merchants that had not yet made the switch to EMV terminals could find themselves liable for fraudulent charges.
See, in the past, consumers could dispute a fraudulent transaction and the bank would usually absorb the cost of the transaction. But as the U.S. lost billions of dollars annually to credit card fraud and high profile data breaches at Target, Home Depot, and other large retailers skyrocketed, the banks apparently got tired of taking on the burden of billions of dollars in fraudulent transactions. They wanted someone else to share the load.
And who better to share that responsibility than merchants like you?
By introducing harder-to-counterfeit EMV chip cards to the U.S. market, banks were able to reduce the likelihood and costs of credit card fraud – but they needed a way to ensure that the better, more secure transaction methods were being used.
To accomplish this goal, banks decided to create the “liability shift,” which made it possible for them to shift the liability for fraudulent credit card transactions onto merchants that didn’t use the latest available, most secure tech: EMV.
After October 2015, merchants were still welcome (and still are) to rely solely on the less secure magstripe technology. The difference was that the merchants would now have to assume the risks of doing so. In practical terms, this meant that merchants who ran a counterfeit EMV card using a magstripe reader could suddenly find themselves fully responsible for covering the costs of the fraudulent transaction.
Ouch.
Wondering about online credit card fraud? As a merchant, you’re unlikely to be liable for that because the costs of fraudulent transactions run on cards that have been reported lost or stolen, as well as on counterfeit cards used online, are typically still covered by banks. (You can breathe easy. Your new online storefront is fine.)
How to Implement EMV Easily in Your Business
Reducing liability and limiting fraud are extremely compelling reasons to make the switch to EMV for counter sales at your business and COVID has introduced yet another key reason for updating your systems: NFC. Near Field Communication is a contactless technology that customers can feel safe using during a global pandemic. Additionally you can accept ApplePay, GooglePay and SamsungPay with our Bolt terminals.
Ready to make the leap? The credit card experts at VelocIT are here to make your transition to chip cards easy.
For Sage 100cloud users, VelocIT is the only payment processor that integrates NFC & EMV card payments seamlessly in Sage and works through Citrix and Remote Desktop.
For Acumatica users, VelocIT is the only payment processor that offers card present / counter sales transactions at every level, to keep your business protected from fraudulent charges during cash sales and cash refunds.
In addition, Acumatica users running VelocIT can take advantage of the newly available branch level control to select processing center configurations that allow merchant accounts to process by location or by terminal. In this setup, each location can have its own separate merchant account, which means merchants can finally run a transaction out of a merchant account at a register and fulfill the order from a different warehouse (standard configurations don’t allow for this, only VelocIT does).
EMV Chip Cards Make Business Sense
Think about it: the magstripe on the back of traditional credit cards uses the same technology as cassette tapes and VHS. We’ve replaced those aging technologies for modern, digital solutions that are far better than their ancient counterparts. Why wouldn’t we also replace the tech that protects our business finances with the better, safer, smarter solution?
And why would your business wait to switch when it’s never been easier to make the leap?
Learn more about chip card technology and your options for getting more out of your credit card transactions when you contact the experts at VelocIT.
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