Most US credit card companies missed the October 1 deadline last year to shift from magnetic stripe to chip enabled EMV cards, according to a report.
Experts cite the laggard adoption pace to the complex US system that will take an equally complex game plan to execute the transition.
EMVCo, the international consortium that developed the EMV chip card standard, says the US lags far behind other countries at 13% to 15% adoption rates. In Africa and the Middle East, 87% of in-personal payments were made with chip cards, 40% in Asia, 72% in Eastern Europe and 97% in Western Europe.
Allen Friedman, vice president of payment solutions at Neuilly-sur-Seine, Ingenico, a leading global payments technology company in France, credits the delay to the fact that the US has the “most complex” cards payment system in the world.
A major migration issue is certification, Friedman says. In most cases, he noted that merchants already have chip ready terminals at their checkout counters but are unable to use them because they have not been certified for security out of sheer number and the complexity and onerous cost of tying the front end with the back end systems.
As a result, merchants are paying a steep price for the delays in EMV chip adoption by covering the cost of fraudulent transactions, as many merchants have experienced, reports said.
