The payment cards industries mandate to transition all US credit cards to EMV chips is almost 1-year-old and has not been an easy ride. Delays, chargebacks that are unwarranted, and even customer confusion as to whether to dip or slide have kept the transaction confusing and slow. The lack of a centralized plan has also contributed to the slowness of the transition.
Merchants who have complied are still getting hit with chargebacks, and this has caused many serious financial harm. But what is the alternative. If you do not convert, then all your swipe transactions, potentially could be charged back if you are using enabled terminals.
In Miami, a class action law filed by a couple of retailers accused the card companies of slowing down the entire process in an attempt to distribute the liability costs onto the retailers. Dieger Bohn, executive editor of “The Verge” tweeted: “US rollout of chip payments has been awful. Every point of sale terminal is a horrible guessing game.”
And he is right. Even though a rash of retails have been approved to implement EMV over the last month, the actual statistics of the number of enabled retailers is very hard to come by. As of 2 months ago the number was around 30{1e9709ef5f3333ae7d8fe6a31af5d3933317716445c13c35f37bf4f9d8e83538} of all US retailers.
Chip and pin seem to be the way to go for the best security, but for some reason, the largest card issuers Visa and MasterCard are opposing this technology. Officially, the bank line is that the pin burdens the consumer, or, they would want you to believe that people cannot remember their pin number.
One of the big issues is that data sent out over the network with a chip is the same as it was when you were swiping. Data is taken in, cc number, expiration date are sent out over an unencrypted network to the processor and then the issuing bank. If you, the merchant, want your data encrypted, there is an extra charge for Peer-to Peer Encryption. This is a better solution, but adds to your processing cost.
The good news is, these are growing pains, and the banks are working on new chip software that is faster to process, easier to convert, and more secure. This software has been promised by December 2016 and should shorten transaction times by a minimum of 15 seconds.
EMV processing is here to stay, and despite the problems now, it is a required and necessary part of all business processing in F2F (face to face) transactions. Your liability for your small business increases 10 fold if you are still swiping and have not converted to the dip technology. It takes time to get your terminals programmed as there is a backlog due to increased demand. Get started right and change to your EMV enabled terminals now.
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