Achieving Peak EMV: How close are you?

During a webinar last week, INETCO introduced the concept of Peak EMV. By definition, Peak EMV occurs when every transaction that should go EMV within your payments ecosystem actually does.

Peak EMV matters because the closer you are to achieving it, the smaller the window of opportunity for hackers to cash in on stolen card data from magnetic stripe cards. Interestingly, a poll question conducted during the webinar showed that at least 47% of the audience participants still have over 10% of their transactions that should be completed as EMV, falling back to magstripe:

So how can financial organizations, retailers and IAD’s close the gap between actual EMV and Peak EMV?  A logical place to start is by figuring out where you are currently at. This can be done by continuously monitoring transactions by type and completion status within your payment systems environment.

It is also important to make sure you can answer questions such as:

• Are there network interoperability or payment switch issues?
• When and where are non-EMV cards being used?
• Is there a POS or ATM terminal configuration problem?
• Are transaction anomalies occurring that may indicate a potential fraud attack?

If you are struggling to obtain this level of visibility, don’t worry – you are not alone. Another webinar poll question indicated that at least 50% of the audience participants are finding it harder to identify transaction slowdowns, failures and anomalies within their EMV environment:

The good news is that innovations in data streaming technologies and data visualization tools have made it easier to get at transaction-level information such as type and completion status. It is now possible to continuously monitor card usage, understand EMV fallbacks in detail, and quickly isolate and fix issues preventing potential EMV transactions from completing the way they should.

If you are interested in figuring out ways to bring you one step closer to your Peak EMV, you can watch the on-demand version of last week’s webcast, or contact us to see a demo of EMV monitoring and analytics.