When I started working on EMV projects, I thought reading data from a chip card was just about plugging it into a reader and magically the data will appear on my screen. I was wrong. The reality is that EMV…

Back when I was integrating a POS system for a merchant in the Philippines, one of our biggest headaches was interpreting EMV data, especially when certification time came. At first, all these TLVs looked like encrypted gibberish. But over time,…

When I was working on an EMV terminal integration project for a merchant acquiring platform, one of the most confusing things for me at first was this: why do some EMV card transactions go through even if the terminal is…

If you’ve worked on EMV before, you already know—it can feel like learning a whole new language. When I was doing an EMV integration project for one of our merchant platforms, I kept bumping into strange acronyms and cryptic specs….

If you’ve ever worked on anything involving payment terminals, you know how frustrating it can be to troubleshoot EMV transactions when things go wrong. Back when I was integrating EMV support for one of our merchant platforms, I had to…

If you’ve ever worked on anything related to payments, especially with EMV cards, you know that sometimes it feels like opening a black box. You swipe or insert a card, magic happens, and the transaction gets processed. But what’s really…

When I first worked on a smart card integration project years ago, I came across logs filed with hexadecimal codes. My instinct was to skim through them but as I would soon learn, those hex values were the hearth of…

When I first started working on EMV integration in one of our terminal projects, I was overwhelmed by how much technical jargon was thrown around. One of the most confusing things I came across early on was something called “TLV”…

Hello again! If you’ve been following my blog, you might remember my previous project about ISO 8583, where we decoded message formats like HEX, ASCII, and Binary. That deep dive into payment protocols was a big part of my journey…

This post is the starting point of a full-blown series consisting of around 45 blog posts that will explore the entire EMV payment ecosystem from the fundamentals to advanced cryptographic operations, issuer scripts, and even certification. If you’ve been meaning…