EMVCo is the body that writes the specifications behind chip and contactless card payments. It is owned jointly by the major payment networks, and its name comes from the original Europay, Mastercard and Visa collaboration. Terminals, cards and payment wallets are certified against its specifications, which is why a contactless card issued in one market works on a terminal in another.
Three parts of its work matter for loyalty. The contactless specifications define the tap itself, including the kernels a terminal runs to talk to a card or a phone. The tokenization framework defines how a real card number is replaced by a device-specific token, which is what happens when a card is added to Apple Pay or Google Pay. And PAR, the Payment Account Reference, gives every form of one payment account a single shared value, so a card and its tokens can be recognized as the same account without exposing the card number.
Wallet passes sit next to this, not inside it. Apple VAS and Google Smart Tap are the wallet platforms' own protocols for handing a loyalty identifier to a reader during the tap; they are not EMVCo specifications, and a reader supports them separately from its payment certification. What connects the two worlds is the terminal: on many payment terminals a single tap can run a card acquisition step that reads the pass and then the EMVCo-defined payment flow, so the member is identified and the purchase is taken in one motion.
For a merchant, the practical takeaway is that EMVCo governs what happens to the payment, and the wallet platforms govern what happens to the pass. Choosing readers that are certified for payments and configured for VAS and Smart Tap keeps both on the same tap target, which is what makes one-tap identification possible at the till.