An EMV toolkit is an essential EMV terminal certification instrument. Each EMV toolkit is targeted at certification of a certain EMV terminal solution in a certain geographical region. After EMV liability shift the problem of EMV toolkit selection became extremely relevant for many companies that want to implement some EMV chip technology.
There are several major brands, offering EMV toolkits for performing EMV tests, including ICC, UL, FIME and others. Before settling on some particular vendor, you need to determine, which EMV payment types you are going to process and where you need to process them.
Payment processors and payment card brands often require you to use some particular EMV toolkit for certification of particular EMV payment types. For example, Visa payWave test tool by UL is a mandatory instrument if you want to certify Visa contactless payments in Europe. Some processors even provide respective software for certification of your EMV credit card reader or terminal. For example, Vantiv requires you to use ICC toolkit that includes a specially customized component called Vantiv viable.
You are welcome to familiarize yourself with our EMV toolkit usage experience and recommendations by reading the respective article on Paylosophy.