Point-of-sale provider Ingenico Group Wednesday announced that Long John Silver's, the largest quick service seafood chain in the U.S., opted to upgrade its payments infrastructure to Ingenico's EMV- and NFC-ready payment terminals to support its upcoming transition to the EMV payment standard in the U.S. The Ingenico product will enable 580-plus Long John Silver's locations in the U.S. to accept both magnetic stripe and EMV cards, and will provide a platform for NFC mobile wallet acceptance in the future.

According to Long John Silver's executives, improved security and PCI compliance were the main drivers for the change.

"As we prepared for the advent of chip-based cards, we also wanted to implement a solution with point-to-point encryption to provide bulletproof security over our customers' cardholder data, while also easing the process of meeting increasingly complex PCI requirements," said Craig Daniel, chief financial officer for Long John Silver's. “During our competitive evaluation, Ingenico proved to have the most secure technology, the greatest experience with EMV, and the most flexible solution that allowed us to leverage our existing infrastructure without having to spend millions of dollars on network and infrastructure upgrade costs."

"Ingenico Group has a great track record in the QSR space, and of course we offer the deepest expertise in both EMV and P2PE, gained from our 30 years of experience in delivering secure payment solutions to thousands of merchants around the world," said Thierry Denis, president of Ingenico Group North America. "We're looking forward to partnering with the Long John Silver’s team as they take this important step of preparing for EMV and strengthening the overall security of their payment infrastructure."