LONDON -- UK-based cashless payment specialist CreditCall Communications has launched a new EMV Toolkit which it says allows terminals such as ATMs, standalone kiosks, point-of-sale terminals or any other Windows-based payment terminal to handle transactions made with chip-based credit and debit cards.
The product, known as EmvX, is based on the CreditCall CardEaseEMV certified transaction kernel. According to a news release, the software can be used to upgrade almost any existing Windows-based payment terminal, whether operating attended or unattended, to accept and process EMV cards.
The EmvX Toolkit is aimed primarily at payment system developers, giving them a suite of software tools to allow EMV compliance to be added to existing Microsoft Windows applications with minimum cost and development time, according to the release.
It is currently available as a free download from CreditCall's EMV Web site at www.emvx.co.uk The Trialware download includes a PCSC driver for any standard EMV Level 1 compliant card reader that supports PCSC.
According to the release, EmvX is based on the Microsoft COM Architecture to enable straightforward integration into applications written in any language that supports COM, such as Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Delphi. EmvX is based on CreditCall's certified UPM Kernel (EMVCo reference 21603 0902 400 20 TUU).
Because the EmvX Toolkit runs in a native environment on the Windows platform, it is faster and more reliable than solutions based on interpreted languages such as Java, according to the release.
System resource usage is low, with the EmvX Toolkit consuming less than two megabytes of memory; on a typical Pentium III-based machine, less than 20 milliseconds of CPU time is spent executing EmvX Kernel code.
Nick McGarvey, managing director of CreditCall Communications, said in the release, "There are thousands of PC-based point-of-sale and other terminals in daily use that are only equipped to deal with magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards. The time is fast approaching where these terminals will have to be EMV readied. EmvX provides a speedy and cost-effective solution to EMV acceptance."
CreditCall Communications has developed cashless-payment solutions at unmanned terminals, including credit card telephony, credit card car parking, cashless vending, ticketing and Internet payment solutions.
