Industry Insights

Please check this page frequently for Paragon's latest industry insights.

EMV Implementation for Issuers: 7 Decisions You Must Make Before Issuing Your First Chip Card

Even if your organization has been issuing magnetic stripe cards for years, you realize the switch to issuing chip cards (sometimes referred to as EMV cards, ICCs [integrated circuit cards], or smart cards) is much more complicated than simply adding a microchip to your card design specs and choosing a chip card manufacturer to produce the plastics. You realize the move to chip cards will ultimately affect every aspect of your institution, from your branch operations to your payments batch processing. Even so, as a card issuer, focusing first on chip card issuance can be a logical starting point in planning your EMV implementation. This article addresses seven key decisions your organization must make before issuing its first chip card Read more

EMV Implementation for Acquirers: 10 Questions to Answer When Formulating Your EMV Device Budget and Timeline

When your institution is planning an EMV implementation (that is the implementation of the Europay, MasterCard, Visa standard for integrated chip cards), it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the project scope. As an EMV transaction-acquiring institution, your organization can expect changes in nearly every division resulting from this fundamental shift in payments processing. When tackling such an imposing project, many experts recommend taking one small step at the time. For acquirers, an obvious first step is evaluating their existing devices and planning for chip-compatible ones. Answering the following device-related questions will help you determine the budget and timeline for your institution’s EMV implementation. These questions must be answered based on your institution’s business plan, network size, card associations, and so forth; and each institution’s answers will likely vary. Despite their differences, however, all acquiring institutions should incorporate these considerations into their EMV implementation planning. Read more

Dispatching the Demanding Dozen: Preparing Your Testers to Face The Financial Industry’s Top 12 Challenges

What is the common denominator for virtually every change faced by financial institutions today? "Make this change and you’re going to need to test. And test again." Which changes will result in the foremost challenges to your FI? What will you need to test, and how? How do you begin to prepare your testers—and your management—for these challenges? Read more

Sugerencias de un Gerente de Soporte de Paragon para implementar EMV en cajeros Diebold

¿Implementando EMV en cajeros Diebold?. Mientras hacía una nueva carga para el cajero de pruebas Diebold Agilis 91x de Paragon, Dana Blegen, Gerente de soporte para los productos de Paragon, encontró unos cuantos "reductores de velocidad". He aquí sus recomendaciones para una más fácil y rápida implementación de EMV en cajeros Diebold. Read more

Diebold EMV Setup Tips from Paragon's Support Manager

Setting up Diebold EMV? While building a new operation download for Paragon's Diebold Agilis 91x ATM test machine, Dana Blegen, Paragon's Product Support Manager, encountered a few "speed bumps." Here are his tips for faster, easier Diebold EMV setup. Read more

EMV Card Fraud: Can Your Fraud Detection System Identify Suspect Chip Card Transactions?

While EMV (chip) cards offer increased security and significant reduction of fraud, chip-and-PIN technology cannot eliminate EMV card fraud entirely. As an EMV card issuer, you must test your fraud detection system to ensure that when suspicious chip card transactions occur, they are promptly identified. Read more

Top 10 Takeaways from the TISQA Conference: Agile Testing in the Carolinas

The message at the heart of the 2009 TISQA (Triangle Information Systems Quality Association) conference, "Agile Testing in the Carolinas," is that when organizations leverage Agile development methodologies, everyone becomes responsible for quality software development. Together with major corporations such as IBM, SAS, and BCBSNC; Paragon sent representatives from Development, Support, Professional Services, and QA to the conference and each attendee came back with renewed interest in Agile testing. This article summarizes the top ten ideas gleaned from this year’s TISQA conference. Read more

It’s Not About the Clicks: Understanding the Other 90% of ePayments Testing Activity

When organizations think about how to improve their testing, all too often they focus on the "clicks"—or how to programmatically accomplish what is perceived as the push-button process of ePayments testing. However, for those for whom testing is a primary responsibility, it is apparent that testing payments systems involves a wide range of activities - and that the time and effort required to conduct the tests likely represents only 10% of the entire testing process . This article examines the tasks associated with electronic payments system testing and helps you understand the tasks that actually make up the bulk of ePayments testing activities. Read more

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

Most EMV testing focuses on cards and terminals. Card and terminal functionality is critical, but verifying your EMV implementation also means testing changes related to your host processing and transaction message flow. What are these “host-to-host” changes related to EMV transaction processing? Read more

How End-to-End Payment Systems Testing Really Ends:
Evaluating Performance, Reliability, and Recoverability

Do end-to-end test plans end too soon? Perhaps—if they do not include meaningful performance and stress testing. Perceived as expensive and difficult to execute, performance testing and stress testing are often eliminated from the test schedule in favor of other test options. However, as institutions face significant changes in systems, product offerings, and delivery channels; the ability to unequivocally determine system capacity, reliability, and recoverability is essential. This article illustrates that this "last mile" of payment systems testing doesn't need to be the hardest. Read more

¿Qué tan extremas realmente son las pruebas de extremo a extremo en los sistemas de pago?:
Evaluando Rendimiento, Confiabilidad y Capacidad de Recuperación

¿Los planes de pruebas completas (de extremo a extremo) finalizan demasiado pronto? Seguramente, si no se incluyen pruebas significativas de rendimiento y estrés. Percibidas como costosas y difíciles de ejecutar, las pruebas de rendimiento y estrés a menudo son eliminadas del calendario de pruebas en favor de otras opciones de prueba. Sin embargo, conforme las instituciones se enfrentan a importantes cambios en los sistemas, oferta de nuevos productos y canales de distribución, la habilidad para determinar de forma inequívoca la capacidad, confiabilidad y capacidad de recuperación del sistema es esencial. Este artículo ilustra que esta "última milla" en las pruebas de los sistemas de pago no tiene por qué ser la más difícil. Read more

Electronic Payments Testing:
A Testing Terminology Primer

Unit testing, integrated testing, functional testing, regression testing, system testing, acceptance testing - how do all of these terms relate to electronic payments testing? Everyone who uses your system is a tester of sorts, but who is responsible for each type of testing, and when does it occur in the development and testing schedule? This article provides an introduction to terms frequently used in financial transaction testing and describes the roles of the testers that are most often responsible for these processes. Read more

Managing Financial Network Mandate Testing

An old adage says “Nothing is certain but death and taxes,” but for testers in the financial industry, network mandates are just as inevitable—however, they need not be as unwelcome. Careful planning can make creating test plans for network mandates more efficient and less stressful. Read more

Playing the Numbers: Assigning EFT Testing Priorities

No organization can test everything. So how do you make intelligent decisions about which tests to include in your EFT regression testing? How do you create a test plan that makes the most of your test resources? This article offers one approach to categorizing and prioritizing your regression testing of electronic payments. Read more

10 Steps Toward Better Black Box Testing

Black box testing of financial transactions—that is, testing system input and output without examining the internal workings of the code—may seem mundane and simplistic to some people in your organization. However, when financial transaction testing focuses only on whether or not a product works “correctly” after a change is made, this testing has failed to address one of the most important aspects of black box testing: verifying that the change makes sense to your users. Read more