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Efforts to make the EMV payment process more appealing to consumers and merchants got another boost with Mastercard Inc.’s announcement Thursday that point-of-sale equipment maker VeriFone Systems Inc. and payment processor Global Payments Inc. now support the card brand’s M/Chip Fast protocol.
The protocol, announced a year ago, enables developers and acquirers to streamline the EMV standard for the U.S. payments market. The EMV standard initially was developed for regions that required offline and online authorization. Payment card authorization is online in the United States. M/Chip Fast, and similar programs from other card brands, eliminate some elements of the standard to improve the transaction experience for online configurations.
The expectation is that M/Chip Fast may have particular appeal to merchants like grocers, quick-serve restaurants, and transit that have a demand for speedy transactions, Mastercard says.
An M/Chip Fast transaction starts the same as a conventional EMV payment, with the insertion of the chip card into the POS terminal. Just as in a conventional EMV transaction, a unique code identifying the transaction is generated. Once the code is created, the card can be removed “with the goal of both decreasing the processing time of the transaction and reducing the cardholder perception of a longer wait at the checkout,” a Mastercard spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News.
VeriFone’s effort includes incorporating M/Chip Fast support into its POS terminals deployed in the United States. Global Payments says it will make M/Chip Fast support available to “key merchants in the fast food, grocery, transit, and other retail environments, where speed is critical to the consumer experience,” says a Mastercard press release.
Mastercard says M/Chip Fast is intended for large and small merchants. “There is no distinction in merchant size,” the spokesperson says. “In fact, some of our early adopters were small organic-food store chains in the northwest corner of the United States,” she says. “Those merchants worked with their suppliers, many of whom specialize in smaller retailers, to deploy the solution.”
Mastercard declined to disclose the number of merchants using the technology. “As mentioned, this was always a product designed for specific retail segments,” the spokesperson says. Visa Inc. said in April that its Quick Chip program is in use at more than 35,000 merchant locations.
Earlier this week, software developer Index announced it had succeeded in reducing EMV transaction times on Quick Chip to one second in a POS software update at New York City-based grocery chain Fairway Market.
Mastercard this week also reiterated its commitment to EMV chip technology. “EMV is an essential upgrade to the payments infrastructure in the United States, which is now the largest chip market in the world and still growing,” Craig Vosburg told attendees this week at Transact17, the Electronic Transactions Association’s annual conference in Las Vegas. “Great collaboration is happening within the industry and progress is being made in the fight against counterfeit card fraud.”
