Beyond Cards and Terminals: Considerations for Testing Host-to-Host EMV Processing

Understanding the Challenges You Face

Now that you have an overview of the considerations, let’s take a closer look at these challenges to your EMV test planning.

Getting the EMV-related resource materials
Often, one of the biggest bottlenecks in EMV testing is acquiring the necessary resource materials: cards, devices, and specifications. Chip cards are often not as accessible as magnetic stripe cards. The acquisition of chip cards can be time-consuming and expensive, and testing certain issuer scripts (a blocked card, for example) can actually render a test card useless. Similarly, finding chip-capable devices which are readily available for your testing can be unexpectedly difficult.

In addition to the EMVCo specifications, Terminal drivers need terminal specifications, and Issuers need the applicable message format specifications and any payment-specific specifications for the cards and applications that the Issuer intends to support. Again, there may be costs associated with acquiring these specifications.

Test scheduling may also be delayed because other entities (Issuers, Acquirers, Switches, etc.) are not ready for—or available for—testing.
Training your development and QA/QC personnel
Physical resources may be difficult to obtain, but finding programmers and testers with EMV experience will likely be even more difficult. Your development team and your QA team will need training—and your staff will benefit most if the provided training is targeted to their needs. While both groups must be familiar with the EMV specifications, developers need information on testing specific pieces of code, while QA testers need to be taught how to validate the cryptograms and to examine EMV messages for issues with formatting and field content. Automated test tools for both groups can accelerate EMV development and certification.
Verifying your terminal configuration changes
As an Acquirer or Terminal Driver, you probably have experience setting up configurations for ATMs and POS terminals, and you may have anticipated the added complexity of configuring terminals to support both magnetic stripe cards and EMV cards. Because configurations that support EMV require interaction with the chip card that is considerably more complex than simply reading a magnetic stripe, you may find errors or omissions in the configuration are more likely. During the implementation phase, you may not have terminals available immediately to take downloads from your host or, conversely, you may have access to a terminal but not to your host system. If you anticipate this may be the case for your organization, you may need to acquire a testing tool to simulate the necessary endpoint (terminal or host) and a configuration test tool for developing and testing the necessary ATM and POS configurations.

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