UL Solutions and Alcineo Advance SoftPOS Payment Security

As software point of sale (SoftPOS) systems are increasingly adopted, especially across emerging markets, companies are looking to build technologies that help solve merchants’ and buyers’ needs in the retail industry. Addressing payment security and functionality requirements is a challenge to many industry players and stakeholders around the world, which is why Alcineo is working with UL Solutions to help provide secure payment options for international issuers, processors and payment service providers (PSPs) in Europe, the United States (U.S.) and Asia.

The acceptance of card-based payments has historically been limited by the need for payment terminals at the point of sale. With contactless and mobile payments continuing to grow globally, new payment applications such as SoftPOS play an important role in the payment ecosystem. Alcineo, a developer of Eurocard, Mastercard and Visa (EMV) payment kernels contact and contactless and logical security modules, partners with payment solution providers before, during and after the deployment of their products. The company works in many areas of the payment ecosystem, including transit, retail, kiosk and vending, outdoor gas stations and restaurants.

In 2022, Alcineo created a new and unique SoftPOS solution and needed to demonstrate security compliance to its customers. This system employs a new technology that helps Alcineo’s customers adopt a payment method accredited by international payment schemes. This new flexible payment process, available through Android smartphones, facilitates the payment process between the customer and issuers/retailers.

Many benefits accompany the new SoftPOS payment technology, including instant merchant onboarding, mobile payment acceptance and reduction in operational costs. However, securing payment in this environment can be quite complex as SoftPOS payment technology lacks the physical and hardware security common in traditional POS systems.

To get its new SoftPOS solution into global markets, Alcineo needed to evaluate it against Mastercard and Visa schemes’ specific functional and security requirements and standards. Alcineo trusted UL Solutions to perform security and functional testing of their new SoftPOS application. UL Solutions completed the evalutions in its laboratory in La Ciotat, France, and demonstrated that Alcineo’s new SoftPOS application met the current industry requirements.

This collaboration combined independent third-party services from UL Solutions with the SoftPOS payment application to help determine that Alcineo is offering a payment solution in conformity with the schemes' specific functional and security requirements and standards for international issuers, processors and payment PSPs in Europe, the U.S. and Asia. The two companies have been working on advancing payment security since 2018, and this latest move marks a new milestone in their efforts to enable more secure payment solutions in this fast-evolving industry.

To learn more about global payment security, functionality requirements and how UL Solutions can help, visit our Payment Security page.