Yet, the certification step is vital to secure and reliable EMV payment transactions, says Randy Vanderhoof, executive

director of the Smart Card Alliance, an industry trade group based in Princeton Junction, N.J.

Without testing merchant POS systems, the configurations, if left up to individual information-technology departments
at merchants, would result in no guarantees the POS systems could properly handle all of the data elements
necessary for an EMV transaction, Vanderhoof says.

The brands [payment card networks] have been forced [to do this] because there is so much customization in the
middleware that they have to put these systems through a thorough end-to-end test, using all different types of
payment transactions, he says.

Thats where the U.S. EMV VAR Qualification Program steps in. Launched in April by the Payments Security Task
Force and the PCI Security Standards Council, the program aims to help VARs and independent software vendors
complete a pre-qualification regime to expedite the EMV-certification process for the systems they sell.