What EMV Means For Your Jewelry Store And Jewelry POS Software

A Short Overview of EMV

EMV is a global standard for credit and debit payment cards which uses chip card technology. EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa which are the entities that developed it.

The goal of EMV is to provide a more secure and authenticated way to make card payments. Essentially, EMV is a move to attempt to limit fraud. Credit card and debit card fraud resulted in losses amounting to $11.27 billion during 2012. Card issuers incurred 63% of those losses. That should give you a clearer idea of the motivation behind EMV. (Source: http://www.cardhub.com/edu/credit-debit-card-fraud-statistics/)

You've probably noticed that your newest credit cards have a little chip in them. That chip is a super small computer. It handles your card data and is much much more difficult to counterfeit than the old magnetic swipe technology. Together with new payment terminal technology, EMV hopes to eliminate card payment fraud at the point of sale.

Jewelry stores and others who sell high value products need to be aware of the coming changes. The liability shift is the key reason why. Beginning in October 2015, stores who do not upgrade their payment processing technology to accept EMV cards could be liable for certain types of fraudulent transactions. Because of the high value nature of jewelry, this should be a serious concern for your store.

BusinessMind POS Software for Jewelry Stores Supports Integrated EMV Ready Payment Capture

Version 6.0.0+ of BusinessMind Software for Jewelers POS module supports integrated EMV payments via terminals available through a certification with TSYS Merchant Solutions.

If your store is equipped with stand alone non-integrated card swipe terminals, contact your merchant services provider and find out what you need to do to upgrade your terminal. In most cases, it will need to be replaced entirely and there will be some cost to do so. Despite the cost, it is well worth it to upgrade your terminals, considering the alternative could be shouldering the cost of a very expensive jewelry item walking out of your store after being purchased using a counterfeit non-EMV card payment.