News

Ascert adds EMV testing and certification capabilities to hosted services

The cloud-based solution aims to ease an expected testing and certification bottleneck as ATM liability shift deadlines approach.

August 20, 2014

Ascert adds hosted EMV certification solutions to help the industry meet mandate deadlines.

Ascert, a provider of testing software technologies including the VersaTest product line, has added new testing features to Ascertified, its hosted testing and certification portal.

Using both VersaTest Automator and Certifier products, the service provides flexible, rapidly implemented testing solutions to meet the needs of testing professionals, the company said in a news release.

Ascert uses the adaptive cloud-based technologies to help provide a rapid and cost effective solution to address the mandates for EMV implementation in the United States, the company said.

No local software installation is necessary as the service is available via any major browser and can be accessed by desktop or mobile device. All software and standard testing environments (including mandates) are included in the service.

Ascert’s hosted offering provides sandbox testing, mandate testing, pre- and final certification testing, regression testing, interoperability, functional testing, load testing, performance testing, smoke testing, stress testing, and security/fraud testing.

Paul Springston, manager of professional services at Ascert, explained the rationale behind the new features:

Adding EMV testing and support was a logical move for us because of the significant need for organizations to perform testing of this type more efficiently in order to meet the EMV implementation deadlines in the U.S. If you look at the time remaining, the number of certifications that must be done, and effort required for each certification to be done the ‘old-fashioned’ way, there’s no way many organizations are going to make the EMV mandate deadline.

We offer a rapid solution to implement association precertification testing that is easy to use, automatically identifies problems in EMV-related message content, and supports recommended card brand test cases. ... [B]y automating much of the manual effort required for analysis and validation of messages and providing immediate feedback on test results, the certification test cycle is made much shorter and QA analysts can support many more testing partners.