Interac EMV Chips Now Supported

As part of our new CenterEdge Advantage 11.2 release, we have completed implementing support for Interac EMV processing in Canada.  For those who aren’t familiar with EMV, sometimes known as chip & pin, it allows Interac cards to be taken using the new chips embedded in the cards.  There is also an Interac Chip FAQ which may help to answer some of your questions.

For all of our Canadian customers currently using our system to process with Interac, we strongly recommend upgrading to this new release and the Interac EMV system.  In addition to being more secure, Interac is requiring all merchants to swith by 2015.  Additionally, there may be fraud liability risks involved in not switching.

In addition to chip technology support, and the enhanced security to comes with it, we’ve also added gratuity support at the pin pad.  Now, for your groups & birthday parties the customer can enter their gratuity at the pin pad.  You no longer need to ask them for a gratuity prior to the transaction being swiped.

As before, we are continuing our excellent relationship with Mercury Payment Systems to help us provide EMV chip & pin services to our Canadian clients.  If you are currently working with the legacy Interac magnetic stripe system and our software, then you are already working with Mercury.  You’ll just need to contact your Mercury sales representative about the costs involved in switching to new pin pads which support the chip technology.

Please note that switching to EMV may require you to add some additional pin pad devices.  When using the EMV system, ALL cards must be swiped or entered through a pin pad device, not just debit cards.  This means that any back office terminal where you take phone reservations for parties and groups will need a pin pad to be able to take the deposit over the phone.  Be sure to account for this when deciding how many pin pads you will require.

If you are interested in receiving this upgrade, please email us at support@centeredgesoftware.com.