CO-OP Financial Services is announcing an agreement with Visa Inc. to make the Visa EMV common debit solution available to its credit union clients, offering a streamlined and cost-effective approach to debit EMV adoption.
"This is a major advance in adoption of the EMV standard for debit card transactions in the United States, providing a clearer migration path to EMV for our debit issuers and ATM owners," said Stan Hollen, President/CEO, CO-OP Financial Services. "CO-OP has been working hard to move the payments industry to an EMV common debit solution, both independently and through our participation in the Debit Network Alliance (DNA)."
This long-term agreement between CO-OP Financial Services and Visa enables development of regulation-compliant debit EMV solutions using a common Application Identifier (AID). Some development will still need to be done at terminals (both POS and ATM) in order to choose the common AID, a priority for industry organizations such as DNA. CO-OP helped found DNA in December 2013, and will continue to play a key role in its activities. Michelle Thornton, Manager-Core Products for CO-OP, is a member of DNA's Board of Directors.
The Visa EMV solution provides portability for debit card issuers, and network routing choices for merchants and ATM acquirers. It also supports all transaction types, including contact and contactless.