By Randy Vanderhoof, Executive Director, Smart Card Alliance

The Smart Card Alliance has created the EMV Connection website as a service to the payments industry. The site provides up-to-date information on the status of EMV migration, along with tutorials and educational resources that will assist with gaining a better understanding of the changes that this migration from magnetic stripe cards to cards and devices that also include EMV chip technology will bring. EMV technology provides added security and new payments options and features for merchants and consumers.

Many of you are familiar with the Smart Card Alliance organization and know about the work that the organization does to provide valuable educational resources — white papers, workshops, conferences, web seminars, slide shows, and online audio and video recordings by industry experts.  As an organization that serves the needs of many different markets who have adopted smart card technology, our goal for establishing the EMV Connection website was to gather all of the smart card-related information that was relevant to the payments industry, give it a unique look and feel and provide an easy-to-use resource that can be refreshed and updated with new information on a regular basis.

The EMV Connection site is designed so that all major EMV stakeholders – issuers, merchants, payment processors/acquirers and consumers – can easily find valuable information that will best help them travel their own unique EMV migration path. :

• Issuers can get a head-start with EMV migration with tutorials and implementation guidance about EMV cards that take advantage of global best practices

• Merchants can learn from industry experts about the impact that EMV will have on the point-of-sale environment and key strategies for managing EMV chip data in their retail operations

• Acquirers and processors can plan their EMV migration to meet the April 2013 requirement to handle full EMV chip data in transactions

• Consumers can learn about how EMV helps to reduce fraud and protect payment transactions and how contact and contactless EMV cards will be used in retail environments

We have included an industry news feed so that breaking news and press announcements can be aggregated in one location.  We have included this industry blog feature so that interested parties can post questions and start discussions on specific topics that they find important to them.  The site also includes EMV resource links to provide convenient ways to find other payments industry resources and payments organization websites, so that visitors including the media can get the information they need quickly and from qualified, reliable sources.

On behalf of the entire Smart Card Alliance organization, we invite you to visit the EMV Connection  website often and use the information you find to help define your own path forward towards EMV payments in the United States.

Sincerely,

Randy Vanderhoof

Executive Director

Smart Card Alliance