Related Initiatives

The EMV-standards developed and maintained by EMVCo are the future technical basis for card-based payment systems. Currently many countries have started their individual EMV-implementation projects based on these standards.

The EMV specifications are functional specifications mainly describing how to process a regular and successful EMV transaction, leaving different implementation options to the issuer and acquirer. In addition to the EMV specifications the payment systems have developed special requirements to be met by card and terminal implementations. This has led to many different interpretations of the EMV specification, which could cause interoperability issues and additional costs for issuers and acquirers, since implementations for one issuer and/or acquirer could not be re-used by another issuer and/or acquirer.

The aim of the CIR Technical Working Group is to come to harmonised implementation requirements throughout the international payment systems. The work is not intended to change the EMV specifications but to fill in the "white patches" of the EMV specifications and to reduce both the effort necessary to implement cards and terminals as well as the number of different implementations, thus allowing for less expensive devices.

The work of the CIR Technical Working Group has started with the development of common implementation requirements for EMV cards and has already led to a successful harmonisation of implementation requirements for EMV-applications on smart cards for both payment systems. The results of the work of the CIR TWG have been contributed to the development of the CCD-specification of EMVCo, an alignment of payment-system specific requirements for EMV-implementation on cards. Based on this first achievement, the work fo the CIR TWG is focused at current on the support of EMVCo in the development of a fully harmonised EMV-implementation specification across the payment schemes, the Common Payment Application (CPA), as well as in the development of the Common Personalisation Specification (CPS).

As a next step the CIR Technical Working Group will focus on the development of a detailed terminal specification. Error handling, the fallback process to magnetic stripe, and some processing details are described only rudimentarily by the EMV specifications. The requirements concerning storage and handling of terminal and card data are not well described.

The objective of the CIR TWG is to develop an unambiguous, detailed terminal specification, describing the flow of an EMV transaction, taking into account transaction details, error handling, fallback to magnetic stripe, storage and handling of data, and payment system specific requirements.

In addition to that the CIR Technical Working Group addresses the implementation of special transaction types e.g. in hotels or restaurants, or at unattended petrol pumps etc. which has not been considered by the EMV specifications as well as the optimisation of EMV transactions in order to minimise the time needed to perform a transaction.

In order to support the implementation projects in the participating countries, the CIR Technical Working Group provides an EMV implementation survey and it can serve as facilitator for communication in case of interoperability issues between partners of the group.