The What, Why and How of EMV® QR Codes™

In 2017 EMVCo publicly released its QR Code™ payment specifications to define QR Code payments in a manner that works to simplify their development and broaden their acceptance globally. In this post, we look at EMVCo’s QR code offering, the benefits this work brings to the global marketplace and how interested parties can contribute to EMVCo’s ongoing QR Code advancements. QR codes are two-dimensional machine-readable barcodes, which are increasingly used to facilitate mobile payments at the point-of-sale. In 2016 EMVCo commenced its QR code activity to create a payment specification that reflected requirements across the payment ecosystem yet delivered universal consistency to consumers and merchants, by encouraging collaboration with payment industry participants. WHAT does EMVCo offer? There are four aspects to our work in this area: 1. Development and evolution of the EMV® QR Code Specification for Payment Systems. These technical documents support two differing QR code payment use cases: Consumer-presented – the customer displays the QR code on their mobile device and the merchant uses an optical scanner to read the code. Merchant-presented – the merchant displays the QR code and the customer uses their mobile device to scan the code. The EMV QR Code Merchant Presented Specification can enable multiple different domestic and international payment programmes and use cases through a single QR Code as well as both account-based and card-based payments. It can also coexist with existing proprietary QR code solutions. This flexibility in the specification enables merchants to accept several QR code payment solutions from various providers in a standardised manner, using a single QR code. 2. Publication of Merchant-Presented QR Guidance and Examples. Written for those involved in planning, implementing, deploying or supporting EMV Merchant QR Codes, the document provides guidance on how the consumer QR Code application reading the Merchant QR code should process the data. While processing of the consumer QR code application is outside of EMVCo’s scope, we recognised value in offering a variety of use case examples to outline the consumer transaction experience. 3. Management of the EMVCo QR Code marks. These are available for use on devices facilitating transactions based on the EMV QR Code Specifications. The QR Payment Mark may be used as an acceptance mark at point-of-sale in collateral marketing, as well as in-app on mobile devices to indicate the consumer may generate and display a merchant scannable QR code. The QR Scan Icon may be used in-app on mobile devices to indicate the consumer may scan a merchant-presented QR code. 4. Establishing and managing the self-evaluation processes. EMVCo makes tools available to EMVCo Associates and Subscribers to submit Merchant-Presented QR Codes for immediate evaluation or to get QR code samples to test their Consumer-Presented QR codes reader. The aim of this is to evaluate whether QR codes are generated or interpreted in compliance to the EMV QR code Specifications. WHY is it valuable to the payment community? The technical documents define QR code payments in a manner that simplifies the development and potentially broadens the acceptance of QR code payment solutions globally. We believe that the definition and clarity provided by the specifications enable merchants to accept QR code payment solutions from various providers in a standardised manner. Consumers will also benefit from a more uniform experience that offers greater convenience and familiarity. These industry benefits can be summarised into six categories: 1. Technical interoperability. The specifications can coexist with proprietary offerings and supports card-based solutions from domestic and international payment programmes, as well as account-based in a single QR code. It also aligns with other EMV Specifications and technology. 2. Confirmed