“Where is my easy button for payments?”

In this day and age, enabling your payment terminal to perform the way you want it to should not be so difficult. But first, you must have the right SDK. 

Exhibit A: The two year anniversary of the October 2015 deadline for implementing the EMV “liability shift” is just a few months away.  So it’s easy to understand that merchants and developers are frustrated at the delays in implementing an effective chip solution.  One main reason is that it is often just plain difficult to get the POS to behave properly with the payment terminal, especially when you factor in rigid compliance requirements for standards like EMVCO and PCI PTS.  Even the best semi-integrated solutions present challenges when attempting to regain lost functionality previously available with MSR-only environments.

Today’s merchants have the choice of multiple integration solutions from gateway providers, processors, acquirers and hardware vendors.  Historically, POS ISVs and VARs have had to integrate traditional retail payment terminals via “low level” application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by hardware vendors. “Low level” integration involves small instructions that interface directly to the resources on the payment terminal, including the PIN pad, card readers, display, and even the EMV kernel itself.  This results in long development times since there are literally hundreds of “low level” instructions required to program a single transaction.  Compound this with the facts that there are nearly 30 different transactions utilized in general retail applications alone and that every transaction type must support each payment method and card brand.  It’s no wonder that there are upwards of 1,200 “L3” test cases that need to be passed before a processor or acquirer certifies a payment solution for production.

Our focus at Equinox is to change the way our partners bring EMV solutions to market. The newest Luxe SDK borrows a page from more nimble software industries (think e-comm and mobile) and contains a set of high level automation tools that perform hundreds of small moves with just a handful of instructions. This leads to a huge time-to-market advantage for developers and allows payment terminals to perform as desired.

So go ahead and ask: “Why can’t my terminal do this?”

(And don’t fret: for those of you that choose to stick with a low-level API, we’ve got that covered too.)

Bohdan Myroniw, MBA