January 29, 2014 - Acquirer Systems, the market leader in enterprise test and validation solutions for the payments industry, today announced that Ed Mastrangelo, Head of Business Development, North America, will be participating as a panellist at the Smart Card Alliance 2014 Payments Summit during the keynote session, "What Retailers Want and Want to Avoid with EMV and NFC".
The 2014 Smart Card Alliance roundtable event will feature retail payments experts discussing how merchants can drive value from both EMV chip and mobile payments, and manage the challenge of implementing these growing payment methods.
The U.S. conversion to EMV will see 110 million customers with secure chip-based smart cards by October 2015. In parallel the growth of mobile payments in the U.S. will reach $90 billion in 2017, according to Forrester Research's US Mobile Payments Forecast, 2013 To 2017. With 1.2 billion cards and 10 million card readers in retail stores, merchants need to understand the implications of both EMV and mobile for their payments systems.
Ed Mastrangelo says, "EMV is a game changer for merchants. It is a vital security layer to payment transactions, but it is also an effective tool that can unlock tremendous value. Secure multi-application and multi-use smart cards can deliver unprecedented commercial benefits when servicing retail customers. The value potential of EMV in the US is further amplified by the opportunity to leverage it simultaneously with mobile NFC technology."
During the roundtable event, merchants will have an opportunity to examine how the rollout of both EMV and mobile NFC acceptance should shape their payments strategies. Ed Mastrangelo will discuss how to simplify EMV implementation with minimal disruption to the existing merchant environment. He will also explain why mobile and EMV are not in competition, and how EMV conversion at the point of sale is building an infrastructure that should accelerate the deployment of mobile NFC payments for every retailer.
"Cards and mobile payments will coexist for years to come. In fact they are complementary and together will drive rapid innovation in retail payments", he says. "US retailers are ideally positioned to implement EMV in a smarter, more streamlined way, than anywhere else in the world. Together EMV and mobile offer increased consumer choice when shopping and also open up the potential for added-value applications from simplifying the checkout process to more sophisticated affinity and reward programs."
Acquirer Systems is a member of the Smart Card Alliance, which is dedicated to supporting the implementation of EMV across the US. The company provides test and validation solutions that help to ensure the successful delivery and integration of EMV, Contactless and NFC technologies for US retailers.
