There are many ways to accept payments in this day and age, but a chip and pin contactless transaction is the quickest way to make a face-to-face payment. As your local hybrid, cloud-based pos for retail & hospitality providers, Haven Systems Ltd can help you with your payment system setup and integration into their existing framework (click here to check them out).
It’s important to have a wide variety of payment options, but you want to keep at the core payment structures such as having a chip and pin reader and secure PCI compliant chip and pin machines.
What is chip and pin technology?
It is sometimes known as EMV or Europay, Mastercard, and Visa. It’s a system that helps establish an additional level of security for your debit and credit cards. In the past, the way it would work with your card would be that you would swipe or slide the magnetic stripe on the back and then have to sign it or enter a pin number if using your debit card.
In the early days, that magnetic card stripe was a major security risk as it was easily cloneable and easy to steal your card details. You may have thought that a debit card would be safe from that but, there were many debit cards that could easily be used as credit cards and use a signature versus a pin code.
Let’s say the security wasn’t the issue, but the overall operational aspect was tedious. The cashier, waiter, or store clerk would have to wait for the machine to process and have the customer sign the receipt.
Then they would have to verify the signature (either through the back of the card or through an ID card) and then they would have to save that receipt for record-keeping purposes. Paper-like that will fade over time, and signatures will fade even faster.
Enter the evolution of the chip and pin. The chip is a square chip on the side of the card that adds a much-needed layer of security and helps to expand the portability of your entire electronic point of sale.
Now there’s no need to verify signatures for either debit or credit cards, and the chip cannot be cloned or forged on the spot as was possible in the past. It’s a must-have to consider holistic epos solutions with a chip and pin reader. The chip itself has complex cryptography and security measures and is only activated within chip and pin machines themselves.
How it has evolved payments
Chip and pin machines may be fully integrated or completely wireless with a base station next to your epos. That means you can take them on the go, and you or your staff as the merchant, cannot take the card away from the customer.
As things have progressed with EMV and contactless card payments, the payment process has become much quicker. Maximum contactless limits have risen from £45 to £100 now so the overall number and value of card transactions, and in particular contactless payments has reached new levels.
You bring the chip ad pin reader straight to the customer, and they are able to insert their card and enter their pin on the spot without any issues. This has also reduced card fraud from these locations, as well as eliminated a common misunderstanding between retail operators and customers. Since the customer is in full control of the transaction through chip and pin systems, then there’s never an issue with payment.
It enabled epos providers to work with smaller frameworks and better technology, since the hardware for card payment readers has become more mobile and smaller, due to not having to have so much security built into the hardware, since the chip covers that area.
That allows the electronic point of sale system providers to focus less on interconnectivity with these chip and pin systems, and more on overall functionality for their customers. Many chip and pin systems are compatible with a variety of technologies and can easily be connected to devices via Wi-Fi, mobile data, and even blue tooth. This type of connectivity is yet another level of security that helps to answer what chip and pin technology is all about.
The world of epos systems and chip and pin systems is only going to get more technologically advanced, and at the same time much easier to use in the day-to-day operations of any type of retail business.
This helps an industry that needs to be as efficient and mobile as possible, especially with recent trends and events within the retail sector. Spending too much time getting a payment system up and running or not offering chip and pin machines can lower customer satisfaction and lead to critical lost sales.
With these smoother operations combined with hybrid cloud-based epos systems, there’s very little reason the focus cannot go back completely to the management and growth of your retail operation and business.
Check out some other information you may not have known about epos systems here including payment integrations. It’ll help showcase some additional items and epos system handles beyond simply ringing a customer up and having them pay.
Must read: Bilingual EPOS Software developed for Wales and the United Kingdom