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Spotlight Innovators

EMV adoption since the October 2015 liability shift, data
also shows month-over-month adoption rates have been
steadily tapering since June 2016.

Moreover, recent statistics show that while most big-
box POS merchants are now EMV compliant, EMV
adoption on the small-to-mid-sized business (SMB) level
has not been progressing as quickly. Payment industry
experts have cited multiple reasons for this slower rate of
adoption, including a lack of awareness and the inability
to make the investment necessary to upgrade to compliant
eadquartered in Troy, Michigan, award-win- POS equipment. Many SMB merchants are also using
ning North American Bancard is an industry proprietary software/hardware configurations that are
leader in credit card processing, providing not yet EMV ready.
H a variety of merchant services that help cli-
ent companies of all sizes develop solutions for payment “As we started analyzing the EMV-adoption gaps, both
processing, including credit, debit, EBT, check conversion in our own merchant base and the POS merchant market
and guarantee, gift & loyalty cards, and much more. As at large, we discovered several restaurants and retailers
an MSP/ISO since 1992, North American Bancard is dedi- were using POS software that wasn’t yet equipped to
cated to offering the highest service levels, exceptionally accept a chip-card payment,” said Justin Muntean, Senior
competitive pricing, and the latest technology to its cli- Vice President of Sales at North American Bancard (NAB).
ent companies, including Pay Anywhere, its proprietary “This proved to be a significant barrier for the sales team
point-of-sale (POS) solution. With over $34 billion worth as they were diligently working to guide these merchants
of payments processed for more than 250,000 businesses through the EMV compliance migration process.”
every year, North American Bancard is determined to help
American business prosper. An innovative “bridge” solution
What’s New: Once this barrier was recognized, NAB’s technical
development team immediately went to work on
identifying an effective, yet fast-turn-around solution.
These efforts resulted in the development of a semi-
integrated POS setup that could be used in conjunction
with a non-EMV-compatible over-the-counter POS
application.

“NAB Velocity’s Semi-Integrated Solution (SIS) is
comprised of flexible and cost-effective software and
a free terminal that allows merchants to safely and
securely perform EMV transactions on their existing POS
systems,” said Jim Parkinson, CIO at NAB. “By limiting the
information that is exchanged between the NAB Velocity
terminal and a merchant’s POS system to non-sensitive
Breaking down EMV data, our SIS reduces a merchant’s compliance risk, as well
as their costs for becoming EMV-ready.”
adoption barriers for Since the company’s signature gateway, Velocity, was
already equipped to securely process EMV-enabled
SMBs transactions, the team built a universal application
protocol interface (API) to safely move data between a
separate chip-enabled terminal and the merchant’s third-
he EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) chip- party POS software application. Paying customers use the
terminal when making chip-card payments, and through
card transition in the United States continues the SIS API, the sensitive transaction data is processed
to progress, but according to recent figures independently through the Velocity gateway without ever
T released by Visa, merchant adoption is begin- touching the third-party POS system. However, the SIS
ning to wane. As of year-end 2016, the company reported API also exports non-sensitive data which is traditionally
38% of all U.S. merchant storefronts that accept Visa captured by the merchant’s POS software, over to the POS
cards (the largest card network in the world), were EMV administrative dashboard in order to keep the merchant’s
compliant. While this figure indicates a significant rise in data and reporting intact.

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