EMV Mobile is EMVCo’s work supporting payments made with smartphones, tablets and wearables — mobile wallets and other card-based payments over NFC — and mobile devices used by merchants in place of traditional terminals. It spans security guidelines for issuers, acquirers and terminals, the security evaluation process for software-based mobile payments, consumer-device cardholder verification best practices, and TapToMobile user-experience guidelines.
EMV Mobile
EMV Mobile covers the phone on both sides of the counter: as the card, in NFC wallets and wearables, and as the terminal, when a merchant accepts payments on a phone instead of dedicated hardware.
- Mobile wallets - Card-based payments from phones, tablets and wearables over NFC, typically carrying payment tokens.
- Phones as terminals - Software-based mobile payment acceptance and its security evaluation process.
- Security guidelines - Issuer/application and acquirer/terminal security guidelines for the mobile context.
- Consumer-device verification - Best practices for cardholder verification on the consumer’s own device, and TapToMobile UX guidelines.
EMV Mobile is less one specification than a coordinated set of guidance, and it is the layer where EMV’s hardware-era assumptions were adapted for software — the same move the agentic payments work is now making again for agents.
Industry: Payments
Related standards
Standards this one builds on, supersedes, profiles or is commonly deployed beside.
EMV
The specification family.
EMV Contactless Chip
The contactless specifications mobile payments tap through.
EMV Payment Tokenisation
The tokens mobile wallets carry.
