In order to achieve a successful and worry-free EMV implementation, it is critical to have adequate planning and to ensure that the related preparation tasks are properly defined and analyzed.
EMV impacts many areas of your organization, including operations, merchant management, transaction acquiring, and customer support.
Based on our experience with EMV implementations around the world, we recommend the following stages: business evaluation, planning, preparation and deployment.
Business evaluation stage
EMV awareness
The first step is to ensure that your organization obtains a good understanding of EMV, the implementation options and the impacts on acquirers and issuers. This will assist you in developing a high-level view of its potential impact on your organization and stakeholders. This awareness exercise should include both the business and technical impacts of EMV.
Business assessment and strategy
Using your newfound EMV knowledge, a team from different parts of your organization should start defining your strategy for the EMV implementation and the associated business requirements and options. Other stakeholders such as processors, vendors and card associations may provide valuable input to this process. The results of this step will also be used as input to determining the overall project budget and approach.
Impact assessment
Once the business assessment is complete, an impact assessment document should be prepared, outlining the impact on the different parts of the organization. This will also determine the overall budgeting requirements for the project.
Organization commitment
As EMV will impact many areas of the organization, it is critical to gain approval and commitment from the senior levels and ensure that the initiative is managed by a single entity with the appropriate authority.
Comprehensive communications
It is crucial that a communications plan be developed and approved by management. An EMV project will create dependencies across the company and staff must understand the scope and importance of the project to ensure deliverables and timelines are respected.
Planning stage
High-level plan and prioritization
Based on the results of the impact assessment, a high-level implementation plan should be prepared. The planning exercise should also include stakeholders and vendors. During the planning, the prioritization of different requirements will be assessed and finalized.
Procurement
As an acquirer, decisions need to be made regarding the compliance of the devices that you may have deployed and any related enhancements or replacement strategy. This will also involve allocating the internal resources and groups required to implement and deploy EMV.
Preparation stage
Development
Based on the analysis of the EMV impacts, modifications will potentially be required to different systems, such as the acquiring and switching software, clearing and settlement, and other customer related systems and functions. This may also involve upgrades or replacement of point of acceptance devices.
Training
An EMV training plan and related materials need to be developed to ensure that every impacted area or group are well aware of the EMV changes to their functions and to ensure that the proper instructions are detailed and implemented.
For an acquirer processor, your sales staff needs to understand how to explain EMV to merchants and sell the benefits. For merchants that don’t support contactless today, training is necessary to ensure positive consumer acceptance; cashiers need to be able to both manage and explain to a confused public this new technology while continuing to process mag-stripe for the foreseeable future.
Testing
Based on our experience with EMV implementations, we recommend that the appropriate time, resources and focus be allocated to the testing phases. EMV impacts many areas of the payments processing cycle and business functions. Allocating the proper time and resources to the testing ensures that potential deployment problems are identified and avoided; for example, some banks charge for each testing and certification cycle.
Certification
EMV impacts devices, cards and transaction processing systems. Each of these areas will have different certification requirements, either from EMV or from the payment associations, or both. The certification aspect ensures that your implementation complies with the specifications and interoperability requirements.
Deployment stage
Pilot
An internal or limited deployment is recommended as it will help ensure that the implementation and procedures are successful. It will also help in identifying any changes or refinements that need to occur prior to the full deployment.
Rollout
Once the results of the pilot are analyzed and accepted, rollout of the EMV services can start. Depending on the size of your organization this may be implemented in a controlled manner to ensure that no issues are identified and the process is properly managed.