UL is proud to launch SmartStripe, a new, innovative testing device emulating magnetic stripe cards and taking away the need of any physical test card.
This makes UL the first test tool vendor to offer a fully automated brand testing of a payment terminal over all three interfaces: contact, contactless and magnetic stripe.
Payment terminal user acceptance testing and brand testing requires tens, and with multiple brands, hundreds of test cards to conduct required test cases to ensure correct behavior of the payment terminal and acceptance of a payment card. These physical test cards can get lost, outdated and corrupted. Therefore maintenance of the complete sets of test cards per brand adds to the inefficiency of manual test case execution which is already time consuming.
With the introduction of the SmartStripe, UL offers acquirers and terminal vendors the complete automated solution to test and certify payment card acceptance devices. The SmartStripe works seamlessly with UL’s payment acquiring test tools providing a tester with automated test execution and test card emulation covering now also magnetic stripe besides contact and contactless card images.
“The SmartStripe, our newest addition to our portfolio of SmartTesting devices. It takes away the need of using a physical test card when testing a POS terminal. No more expired or damaged physical test cards; simply simulate the latest cards for magnetic stripe testing. We are confident that our customers will benefit greatly from this addition since it further automates their testing environments,” comments Maxim Dyachenko, Manager Service Line Test Tools at UL Transaction Security.
The SmartStripe emulates magnetic stripe tracks 1 and 2. Simply insert the probe in the magnetic stripe slot of a card acceptance device and keep it in place while all test cases are executed. It is possible to also swipe it as a magnetic stripe card, but leaving the probe in its place in the slot saves up valuable test execution time allowing to run more efficient testing.
The SmartStripe connects to a USB port and works without installing any drivers. The card track emulation is managed directly from a test tool. Besides using the SmartStripe to emulate correctly functioning magnetic stripe test cards, it is also possible to simulate parity errors (per byte) and errors in the LRC (per track) as well as configure different bit rate per track.
The SmartStripe is part of the SmartTesting portfolio developed by UL. The portfolio consists of dedicated hardware components for testing smart cards and terminals (POS and ATM). These include SmartStripe (for magnetic stripe emulation), SmartLink Box (for contact chip emulation) and SmartWave Box (for contactless card and NFC mobile phone emulation). ATMs and other devices equipped with a motorized reader with a shutter can be tested with Smart ATM Test Cards.
The SmartTesting hardware devices can be used for testing, analyzing, intercepting and modifying communication signals between a smart card and a terminal. With the powerful UL test tools (Collis Brand Test Tool, or Collis Card Simulator) the test equipment can simulate the full functional behavior of any smart card, including the ones required for brand testing by American Express, Discover, Diners Club, JCB, MasterCard, Union Pay International, and many others.