Is your credit union ready for EMV?

by CUES Skybox

EMV players prepare for Oct. 1

by: Lisa Hochgraf

Credit union members are starting to get EMV “chip” cards in the mail. Big merchants are placing point-of-sale readers that can handle the new cards in many of their locations, but not planning to actually enable this functionality until Oct. 1.

These are the real-life signs that players in the world of EMV cards are indeed getting ready for the liability shift planned for Oct. 1 by the “Network of Four” (MasterCard, Discover, American Express, and Visa) for domestic and cross-border counterfeit card-present point-of-sale transactions. Once the shift takes place, liability for card fraud will be assessed to the party that did not enable the EMV transaction.

At the CUES School of Payments yesterday, Terence Roche made some educated predictions about what players will have done by the deadline. Principal of CUES Supplier member and strategic provider Cornerstone Advisors, Scottsdale, Ariz., Roche said that 79 percent of issuers are expected to have replaced magnetic stripe-only cards with EMV cards by Oct. 1. In all, 575 million EMV cards are expected to be issued this year.

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