How accept credit cards for point of sale in iOS

Question

I'm upgrading my POS app for iOS. I want to provide the ability for my customer to accepts credit cards for sale THEIRS products.

My app is international, mainly latin-america, so I prefer a worldwide-solution (even if is necessary to support several payments gateways).

I already have the hardware to read the cards.

But have a very hard time to understand which payment-processors I need to support.

My first inclination is build on top of ActiveMerchant a web-service but apart of the API calls to it, I have no clue what steps I need to perform...

Answer 1

You can license EMV L2 (Level 2) Kernel compliant with EMV 4.3

AISCES (http://www.aisces.com) provides such EMV L2 (Level 2) Kernel in a platform independent library coded in ANSI C.

EMV L2 (Level 2) Kernel - http://www.aisces.com/emvl2library/

Answer 2

So I see you have a problem here, because what you want may be not possible. First, to accept cards you need to read and process chip and mag stripe cards. This is less problem as you can attach reader to your iOS device. The bigger problem is that you have to fullfill PCI DSS security standard to store and process PIN codes. No iOS device is PCI DSS certified. That means even if you write great payment application and you will be able to process credit cards and check PIN, no acquirer will sign contract with you, because you don't have certified hardware.

Also to process chip cards your reader has to be EMV level 1 certified, and your software processing card EMV level 2 certified. And you rather can't skip chip cards, as stripe cards are being phased out currently.

So the only option I see for you is to connect a certified pinpad to iOS device. There are pinpads with card reader, like Verifone SC5000 or Ingenico i3070. Then you can put all payment processing software on pinpad and use iOS device only as a communication device. But I am not sure if this is what you expected :)