In order to push and to develop the chip based EMV payment method in the Swiss market, the listed companies combined their forces and developed the standard ep2 for card present and distance payment. With this ep2 standard the current eft/pos infrastructure of credit and debit terminals, as well for vending machines in Switzerland is defined. The result is an open payment system based on international standards and recommendations, which is not only implemented within Switzerland but throughout Europe and in Australia.
The Technical Cooperation ep2 association was founded on April 12, 2007. With this foundation, the efficient and eleven year long cooperation between the Swiss acquirers and Verband Elektronischer Zahlungsverkehr (VEZ) got an adequate legal form. The association has the following members.
Aside the organizations which are part of the Technical Cooperation ep2 association, there are additional companies offering acquiring services
The ep2 standard has been introduced in May 31, 2003 and fulfills all needs of a modern cashless payment standard. Today > 95% of the terminals in Switzerland have been migrated to the ep2 standard.
Today, there are a multitude of ep2 compliant terminals from different suppliers available.
Older protocols and security standards have arrived at the end of their lifecycle. In addition operating parallel systems causes high costs for all processors. After many years of parallelism and due to the decreasing number of old terminals, therefore merchants with non-ep2 compliant infrastructure were requested by acquirers to replace the old technology with ep2 compliant terminals and systems until the end of 2010.
Therefore besides the companies developing the ep2 standard as part of the association, numerous manufacturers started to offer services or products as licensees.
The annual reports of the TeCo are available below:
An overview about the ep2 features can be downloaded below:
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