VeriFone is adding EMV acceptance to its SAIL mobile point-of-sale platform and taking on the world. The company has announced the launch of SAIL EMV, a new platform that lets financial institutions and merchant acquirers provide smartphone- and tablet-based chip-and-PIN card payment acceptance solutions to their small and medium-sized customers. The service is being offered in more than 100 countries

"International deployment of the SAIL platform provides a unique mobile payments solution that enables rapid expansion and adoption of secure chip-and-PIN technology through thousands of VeriFone’s international banking and acquiring partners," said VeriFone CEO Douglas G. Bergeron. "The open, flexible and modular nature of SAIL EMV is attractive to organizations that want to expand sales with smartphone and tablet payment solutions for small merchants."

SAIL EMV comes with a chip-and-PIN reader that plugs into a device's audio jack and processes both chip-and-PIN and magnetic stripe cards using a standard app. The solution, which VeriFone markets as a completely open platform, also includes mobile phone SDKs for integration with iOS and Android mobile platforms. It offers a secure transaction management system using VeriFone’s Point Gateway payment-as-a-service global infrastructure. These additional features mean SAIL EMV provides a comprehensive mobile POS solution that banks and processors can offer merchants.

The SAIL platform is currently in production in multiple countries, VeriFone said, with additional deployments scheduled for the first quarter of next year.

The addition of EMV processing, as well as a push into international markets, ups the ante for competitors in the mobile POS market. Square, which recently began offering services in Canada, has been eyeing wider international distribution for some time. However, its card reading dongle, only processes magnetic stripe cards.

Only Swedish mPOS provide iZettle offers EMV processing to multiple markets. It's available in several European countries including the Nordic countries and most recently, the U.K.

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