Guest Column | March 8, 2016

Status Check: EMV's Impact On Retail

EMV Liability Shift

By Andrey Tikhonov, Senior Director, Payment Technology, Infinite Peripherals, Inc.

Several months after the EMV liability shift took effect in the U.S., the scenario at retail shows some stores fully compliant, some partially and some not at all. As this transition is expected to be multi-year, progress continues gradually.

Implemented to increase card security and reduce the multi-billion-dollar credit card fraud in the United States, EMV shifts the liability for counterfeit transactions to the least EMV-compliant party; so, if an EMV card is presented but the merchant cannot process it, the merchant is responsible for the cost of the fraud.

To date, about 37 percent of U.S. merchant locations are EMV-ready, according to a recent survey by The Strawhecker Group (TSG) of 92 payment-service providers, representing more than 3.9 million merchants, or about 50 percent of the U.S. card-accepting market. Another report from Boston Retail Partners (BRP) indicates that only 22 percent of retailers currently support EMV.

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