Merchant Express Supports and Educates Merchants about EMV Adoption

The U.S. is one of the last countries to migrate to EMV — the global standard for credit and debit payment cards, based on chip card technology developed by Europay, MasterCard, and Visa. Several U.S. banks now offer EMV credit and debit cards for smoother travel abroad.

The enhanced security of chip technology uses EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) global standards for processing card transactions and its prime benefit is the reduction in card fraud resulting from counterfeit, lost and stolen cards. Its technology works through a microprocessor chip embedded in the card which is programmed and encrypted with information. The chip safely stores the information required to authenticate, authorize, and process transactions (information exchanged between the card, the terminal, and the acquiring bank’s host).

This is the same type of information already stored on the magnetic stripe but with far less vulnerability to data theft. EMV credit and debit cards and EMV payment transactions are secured through enhanced functionality in three areas – card authentication, cardholder verification and transaction authorization.

American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa have all announced their plans for moving to an EMV-based payments infrastructure in the United States:

• In August 2011, Visa announced plans to accelerate chip migration and adoption of mobile payments in the United States, through retailer incentives, processing infrastructure acceptance requirements and counterfeit card liability shift.
• In January 2012, MasterCard announced their U.S. roadmap to enable the next generation of electronic payments, with EMV the foundational technology.
• In March 2012, Discover announced implementation of a 2013 mandate for acquirers and direct-connect merchants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, to support EMV.
• In June 2012, American Express announced its U.S. EMV roadmap to advance contact, contactless and mobile payments and plans to begin issuing EMV-compliant cards in the U.S. in the latter half of 2012.

The U.S. EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) migration mandate has a deadline of April 19, 2013, which requires acquiring banks to upgrade their systems in order to accept EMV transactions, and processors including Merchant Express to fully process EMV card payment transactions on behalf of our merchant clients. We are fully prepared to support and educate our merchants about EMV adoption.

Merchant Express encourages our merchants not to delay in deploying EMV terminals because the longer you wait, the greater the likelihood of becoming a target of fraud will be. In Europe, fraud figures have shown a clear decline when compared to magnetic stripe only, and fraud has moved to areas where there is no chip enabled infrastructure such as the U.S. or to card-not-present transactions, such as Internet payments.

The transition from magnetic stripe-based credit card processing to chip-based credit card processing has been incentivized by both MasterCard and Visa for retailers who upgrade their equipment to EMV-compliant technology that accepts both contact-based and contactless payments. One of these merchant incentives includes the ability to opt out of yearly data security compliance audits if the merchant meets a certain percentage of transactions which involve EMV technology.

By October 2015, liability for a counterfeit card transaction that occurs at a merchant who has not switched over to a contact chip terminal will shift from the card issuer to the merchant services provider, who could then pass those costs along to the merchant through additional fees.

You can count on Merchant Express to prepare you with sufficient EMV training, implementation and support in the adoption of EMV chip technology. We can help your business and customers benefit from a greater level of payment security and new wireless technology that offers convenience to shoppers and greater sales opportunities to merchants.