In most of the countries around the world, there is no major business analysis done to check the need and feasibility of migrating ATMs to EMV. At best, it is more of an execution planning, given the central bank mandates, liability shifts and increasing frauds.

As the banking costs are raising and customers are frustrated with raising banking charges, self servicing ATMs are seen as additional channels for service delivery. Ways are being identified to converge ATM services to complement with customer owned devices like mobiles.

Every country is at its own stage in EMV migration and that does not make life easier with international payment network agreements. Some are starting to implement EMV, some have already migrated POS and so on and so forth.

Given such importance to ATM, migrating them to support EMV is a project that would have several stakeholders, various compliances, internal systems and the customers. Planning, coordinating and communication are the key activities to make it easy on the customers and other stakeholders. At the end, the focus is always the customer and their delight in smooth transition from magnetic stripe to EMV.

The following are some of the key tasks, when addressed will make things easier in the migration:

1. Assess business needs – which payment schemes, cards to be supported
2. Assess the various models of ATMs, dip or motorized and their readiness in migration. For instance, whether they already have chip readers, their support for your specific business functions, whether it needs to be updated or replaced
3. Please ensure the terminal and kernel are EMV L1 and EMV L2 certified with the expiry date at least an year away and they have an OS, which has not seen the sun set
4. Co-ordinate internally with the card issuing department
5. Civil, electrical rework necessities in the ATM kiosk
6. Functional, language, user experience testing of the ATM terminal, as this will not be covered as part of payment scheme testing
7. Assess the need for acquiring and issuing host testing and certification (NIV, GCT etc.) with the associated payment scheme – D55 change may have an impact
8. Payment scheme testing and certifications (ADVT, MTIP etc) covering ATM application. Acquirer Host system is the final step before deployment
9. Make sure internal clearing & settlement, customer support teams, risk teams are all aligned towards customer protection, response and delight

The banks that use third party processors also need to ensure that their customers are taken care of, by being a part of the processor planning and migration.