STS has always been at the forefront of the EMV wave in the UK and is now embracing some of the 'younger technologies' such as contactless that are emerging. But, if you cast your eye beyond the British shores at the moment you can see the same wave of EMV activity that the UK saw in 2005 / 2006 happening elsewhere. Over the last six months we have been really spreading our wings and getting involved in projects in Japan, Finland, Estonia, Spain and Australia / New Zealand in addition to the work in the UK.
The drivers can be different in each country (Spain for example has more issues with transaction denial by travelling EMV card holders than from direct card fraud) but the end goal is the same, to ultimately protect themselves against the growing global fraud trend.
Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, the Nordics, Eastern Europe and the Asia PAC region are all starting to turn their attention to EMV and as we saw in the UK this creates a snowball effect, all it takes is one of the large retailers to take the plunge and the rest will follow.
In the key European markets, the larger merchants are now in the process of moving their integrated systems to EMV and a lot of the tier two and three retailers are making positive noises about following suit.
One of the major advantages to our partners away from the British Isles is that the UK is already a long way down the EMV upgrade path, what I hear you ask do you mean by the EMV upgrade path?
Thinking from a UK based merchants point of view for a second, on the 14th of February 2006 they were forced to go down the Chip and PIN route which in most cases was a significant investment, often requiring a full POS refresh. Two years on and the spectre of PCI rears its ugly head, for a lot of the UK merchants this means that the PED's they bought in 06 need to be replaced - for those few not using Emvelink this means another significant investment to develop drivers for new devices as well as the hardware investment.
November 2007 saw the 'London Launch' of contactless payments, for the larger merchant with integrated systems this means making decisions about their strategy - to accept or not accept - additional device or hybrid PED - when?
All of these advancing payment technologies and standards have meant that the UK merchant has always been playing catch up to adopt the latest thing; there has not really been a period of stability in the last few years.
As STS has been through this pain (several times) in the UK we are perfectly positioned to guide our customers and partners through this maze. We have also developed all of the solutions required already, we have the support for the contactless devices, we have the support for the PCI compliant devices, we have been through a number of roll outs and countless approvals.
Our Non UK partners can take advantage of this knowledge (actually anybody can due to the creation of 'STS Consulting' - to be launched very soon - keep an eye on our website) and in most cases there is no need to follow the 'upgrade path' that the UK took. Rather than baby steps these customers can leap straight into fully integrated contactless hybrid devices with PCI compliance as standard (or whatever their end goal is). By using STS solutions our customers are future proofed today.