In the late 90s Visa, MasterCard and Europay rolled out a global initiative for making credit and debit payments using smart cards. Known as the EMV standard, it has been seen as one of the most effective tools in fighting card fraud worldwide. The EMV standard defines many aspects of smart card deployment, including the visual appearance of a card, terminal hardware and software, personalisation, cryptography, transaction processing algorithms, etc. Although in 2011 the number of EMV cards in circulation around the world exceeded 1.2 billion, overall, the global rate of adoption is still only 40%, with some regions registering around 15%. Amongst other factors, upgrading the authorisation host, terminal network and card personalisation system in order to handle the EMV card poses a great technological and budgetary challenge.

In order to ease the burden of EMV migration, Compass Plus offers an inexpensive EMV compliance solution for issuers and acquirers respectively. TranzWare EMV Issuing Host and EMV Acquiring Host have been designed with affordability and ease of implementation as its primary objectives. The solution’s most unique and valuable feature is EMV transaction support without replacing or performing any upgrades or modifications to the existing processing facilities. TranzWare EMV Issuing or Acquiring Host performs EMV transaction processing making use of EMV-compatible HSMs. Transactions generated by magnetic stripe cards are processed in the usual way by being routed to the existing authorisation host unmodified. Such an implementation approach is enabled by another useful toolset – TranzWare Migration Kit, which was specifically developed to support migration from obsolete host systems. This proven toolset is comprised of a number of components including emulation and parameterised switching features. Using these components eliminates the need to install specialist host-to-host protocol or even reconfigure the existing host as the two hosts interact using the TranzWare emulations of the payment network interfaces supported by the existing processing host.

Both TranzWare EMV Issuing and Acquiring Host provide a simple phased upgrade of the existing processing facilities ensuring incremental migration to the EMV compliant solution with a much more bearable financial impact.