Intuit POS Japan

If you’re a business owner, you’re probably wondering about the EMV migration and what it means for your business.

You might have already come across phrases like “Chip-and-PIN” or even dreaded the October 2015 deadline. You might even have asked yourself why it’s taken so long for the United States to catch up to a technology that had its roots laid down by the global payments industry over 15 years ago.

If any of these questions have crossed your mind, we’re here to give you answers. But before we get into the details, let’s cover the basics.

The Players, the Terms and How They Work Together

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it will give you a solid idea of who performs what function and how each affects your business.

EMVCo

EMVCo is the standards body managing the EMV migration. Before affecting merchants here in the U.S., EMVCo supervised the implementation of EMV technology across the globe. They’ve also helped U.S.-based companies with their own EMV migrations over the past few years.

Founded in 1994 by Europay, MasterCard and Visa, the namesakes of the acronym “EMV, ” the EMVCo group now includes American Express, Discover, Japan Credit Bureau and China UnionPay.

Brand

Sometimes called a “scheme, ” a brand is the type of company that’s perhaps most familiar to cardholders. In the United States, the prominent brands are American Express, the Discover Network, MasterCard and Visa.

Brands write and maintain the rules for processing transactions within their brand network of banks, merchants and other parties, and work to increase their brand’s acceptance by merchants and consumers.

Through EMVCo, these brands wrote the requirements that will guide the American EMV migration for the entire credit-card payment ecosystem, including the impending merchant liability shift deadline on October 1, 2015.

Issuer

An issuer is any business or body that issues credit cards that are backed by a brand. Typical issuers include banks and credit unions, which issue branded credit cards to consumers. The issuer is the organization that consumers deal with when processing certain brands of credit cards.

Non-financial institutions, such as larger department stores, can also issue their own credit cards that may or may not feature a brand.