Increasing Merchant Needs for POS Hardware
Providing a variety of hardware options to cater to different merchant needs is essential for a well-rounded and successful POS platform. Merchants can vary significantly in terms of their size, business verticals, mobility requirements, and other factors. POS platforms should support a wide range of hardware form factors, such as tablet-based solutions, kiosks, mobile POS devices, and smaller form factors. This flexibility allows merchants to choose the hardware that best suits their specific business requirements.
POS Market is Heavily Hardware-Dependent
Today, most POS(Point of Sale) platforms are heavily tied to POS hardware, limiting their flexibility and scalability. POS platforms have been facing hardware integration challenges, especially concerning the EMV Kernel (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa Kernel) and its placement in the hardware. EMV Kernel is responsible for the secure processing of card-present payment transactions, ensuring card authentication, cardholder verification and risk management, thus protecting against fraudulent activities.Hardware manufacturers don’t have an open and standard interfaces, making the integration process quite challenging.
Hardware-based EMV Kernels make the integration difficult
The issue lies in the fact that the EMV Kernel and transaction logic are often tightly integrated with the hardware, making it difficult for POS platforms to seamlessly integrate with various hardware types. Having the EMV Kernel embedded in the hardware, each new hardware integration requires a significant effort between POS platform provider and hardware manufacturer. There are many SDK calls, callbacks, error codes, and messages between the hardware and the POS application, making the integration process difficult.
Cloud-based EMV Kernel
Developing a cloud-based EMV Kernel that can be decoupled from the hardware and run on the cloud would offer greater adaptability and scalability. Cloud kernel offers following benefits:
Minimum onboarding effort
With EMV Cloud Kernel, hardware becomes only a user interface and card communication device nothing else. This drastically reduces hardware integration effort.
Seamlessly Integrate to any Hardware
The current setup ties the POS platform to specific hardware configurations, making it challenging for merchants to switch or upgrade their hardware without going through a complex integration process each time.With EMV Cloud Kernel, the integration is done with EMV Cloud service only once, rather than hardware. One cloud kernel integration enables POS platform to work with multiple hardwares.
Plug and Play POS Hardware
With the Cloud kernel, hardware becomes a commodity. Like you are getting a mouse from supermarket for your computer, you can choose a POS hardware device and use it along with your POS platform.
Increase Service Quality by Minimizing Hardware Issues
Today, majority of issues merchants encounter is related to the hardware. It may be due to a wrong callback, incorrect EMV parameter, or a EMV software issue running on the hardware. When POS hardware is abstracted from all these overwhelming stuff, then hardware issues will be significantly minimized.
Save from EMV L3 Certification Time and Cost
When new hardware is integrated or optimized versions of existing hardware are introduced, the POS platform often needs to undergo repeat certifications (EMV Level 2 and Level 3) to ensure compliance with payment processing standards. This can be time-consuming and costly for both the hardware manufacturer and the POS platform.During EMV L3 certification, there are multiple back and forth between hardware manufacturer and POS platform provider to fix issues. When hardware becomes only a user interface and card communication interface, then certification time and cost will be significantly reduced.
Conclusion
By addressing these challenges and adopting more flexible and standardized approaches, POS platforms can become more adaptable to merchant needs, reduce integration efforts, and improve the overall payment processing experience for both merchants and consumers
Fairbit EMV Cloud Kernel
Fairbit, a U.S based company, offers a Visa and Mastercard certified and cloud-based EMV L2 kernel. With a team having 20+ years experience in payment market and developing 10+ EMV L2 kernel project, Fairbit is one of the leading provider in this area. Please visit https://fairbit.com for more information. You can reach out to [email protected] to get more information.
