Switstack Secures Pioneering Patent for Software-Defined Card Processing

At Switstack, our mission has always been to simplify in-store payment acceptance and accelerate innovation in the payment industry. Today, we are thrilled to announce a significant milestone in that journey: the granting of U.S. Patent No. 12,106,298, titled Development Environment for Payment Solutions Using Software-Defined Card Processing.

A Breakthrough in Payment Innovation

The payment ecosystem is evolving rapidly, but businesses continue to face challenges in developing and deploying EMV-compliant payment solutions efficiently. Our patent introduces a software-defined card processing environment, a transformative approach that eliminates many of the inefficiencies associated with traditional EMV development.  

Historically, payment terminals have always followed a "Software Last" approach, treating software as an afterthought to hardware. This has created hardware dependencies around each step in developing software for terminals including coding, QA, certification, and maintenance.   This has created an inefficiency in all of these activities since there is a ‘hardware dependence’ loop where each activity must be run or tested on specific hardware.  This has also created headaches for deployment in different environments.  

We are redesigning EMV development with a "Software First" approach, enabling better software, smooth and continuous integration and delivery pipelines with an emphasis on speed, flexibility, security, and trust. The result is an efficient, software-driven card processing system.

By taking a software first approach, EMV development teams can ‘work on’ development activities independently of payment hardware platforms to achieve faster integrations, improved software quality, top-tier security compliance (PCI), and agnostic deployment on any hardware or environment.

A software defined approach to card processing enables the the following capabilities and allows teams to build and deploy EMV  using the same best practices and virtual environments that they are accustomed to. 

• Virtualized resources management such as card, security assets, and more. 
• Automated testing
• Security
• Scalability

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This patent reinforces Switstack’s vision of reducing complexity, accelerating certification, and improving flexibility in payment acceptance. By abstracting and virtualizing key aspects of EMV card processing, developers can test, iterate, and deploy solutions faster than ever before—without the traditional hardware constraints that have long slowed innovation in the industry.

Switstack Payment Solutions

Switstack moka is a Platform-as-a-Service offering an always up-to-date, ready-to-certify and source-available EMV stack, with all the tools necessary to develop, test, debug, qualify, certify, and maintain EMV payment acceptance solutions.  It is ideal for projects that require a new EMV Level 2 to build a COTS or PCI-PTS product or extending an existing EMV stack with new kernels. It is available for download with a 90 day evaluation license.  

Swittest is an EMV Level 2 testing service offering automated and flexible L2 tests that meet EMVCo and schemes specs for any existing EMV implementations.  It is fully compatible with major EMV L2 libraries and test probes. Available for L3 tests in 2026.