EMVCo — CPA

Common Payment Application (CPA) is a payment specification, for Contact interface only, developed/maintained by EMVCo. Current (as 17 Feb 2021) version is v1.0, 2005

CPA is an owner specification (by EMVCo) which is CCD — compatible.

There are limitations for Payment products based on CPA as the lack of supporting Contactless for CPA as a specification. Therefore, for payment schemes who intend to use CPA as their payment specification they extend CPA.

European Card Payment Cooperation (ECPC) develops CPA Contactless Extensions (CPACE).

Even global payment schemes (e.g. Visa/Mastercard), they also ‘take’ CPA as their payment specification for Contact interface, with their own extension on Contactless interface:

Visa — VIS (for Contact) + VCPS (for Contactless), for most Visa card products

Visa — CPA (for Contact) + VCPS (for Contactless), minor portion of Visa card products

Mastercard — M/Chip Advance (for dual interface), for most Mastercard card products

Mastercard — CPA (for Contact) + PayPass (for Contactless), minor portion of Mastercard card products

Note: EMVCo can be considered as a payment scheme consortium while Visa/Mastercard is individual payment scheme.