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Education

Your EMV transition:

It gets better

By Bob Olson and Naga Jagadeesh
ThoughtFocus

hilosophers have said that to struggle is to
learn. In that case, the U.S. EMV (Europay,
Mastercard and Visa) transition has been a
P powerful teacher indeed. Every player in
the long, complex card processing chain has struggled
to come to grips with a mind-boggling set of exacting
requirements.

But there's good news: the rest of the journey can go
much, much better ‒ easier, faster, safer and cheaper.
A quick recap

Five years ago, when the EMV transition turned
serious in the United States, it was a free-for-all.
Every participant – manufacturer, software developer,
merchant, gateway, switch, processor, card company,
issuing bank, paying bank – found itself daunted by
the urgent need to identify every device, process and
connection that must conform to the EMV protocol.
They have had to tease out each noncompliant piece-
part, conform it, put it all back together again seamlessly,
submit it all for EMV testing and certification, and then
go live with confidence.

It hasn't matched Y2K in terms of apocalyptic scenarios
envisioned, but technically it is even more complex. That
complexity and the myriad independent approaches
to solving the challenges have virtually guaranteed
delays, rework and cost overruns. By the liability shift
deadline (October 1, 2015), only 40 percent of American
cardholders had the new chip-enabled cards, and
only a quarter of American merchants were EMV-
compliant, according to USA Today (www.usatoday.com/
story/money/personalfinance/2015/09/30/chip-credit-card-
deadline/73043464) and other sources.

But those numbers belie a powerful advance, which is
the formulation of elegant frameworks for some of the
knottiest EMV transition challenges. At the start of the
transition, every step of every solution had to be solved
one step at a time, by every player.

None of those solutions was easy or fast. For each chal-
lenge, detailed requirements had to be scoped and de-
liverables defined, followed by painstaking develop-
ment and testing that could easily take weeks and even
months. But during that process, it became obvious that
these components frequently used common denomina-
tors, and that by building these common denominators

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