Payment technology company First Data and Verifone have announced a partnership to help U.S. merchants reduce exposure to large-scale consumer payment data breaches and expedite merchant acceptance of EMV-enabled credit and debit cards.

Large-scale theft of consumer payment data from merchants’ integrated point-of-sale (POS) systems is among the biggest challenges facing the payments industry. Another challenge comes from the significant number of merchants POS integrators and other payment providers looking to certify new EMV-capable devices in response to the mandated fraud liability shift from bank to merchant in October 2015.

“As we have seen over the past few years, data breaches have become widespread and undermine consumer confidence and privacy. While EMV acceptance in the marketplace will strengthen data protection, it creates a burden on merchants and those that serve them,” said Guy Chiarello, president of First Data. “This partnership with Verifone furthers our objective of working with the leading payment technology providers to benefit merchants and their customers.”

To address this burden, First Data said it will now offer Verifone’s Secure Commerce Architecture (SCA) solution to its U.S. merchant clients who use Verifone equipment within an integrated point of sale (IPOS) system. According to the companies, SCA helps to solve the difficulties of EMV compliance by eliminating the flow of consumer payment data into the IPOS. Payment data will also now flow through First Data’s TransArmor data protection solution, enabling encrypted delivery directly to First Data from the Verifone payment terminal.