EMV Shift & Truckstops: One Year Later

Truckstop and travel plaza operators along with the en­tire retail industry are still working to comply with the EMV shift—the move to align credit and debit cards in the United States with proprietary chip technology—that took effect Oct. 1, 2015. Under the new requirements, merchants have to adopt EMV-compliant devices for in-store sales or assume the liability for fraudulent transactions.

The transition has created a num­ber of challenges for retailers, includ­ing installing the equipment, getting the necessary approvals to turn on the machines and educating consumers on how to use the new cards. Retail­ers have also faced a greater number of chargebacks, which are costly.

“Far and away the number one issue I hear from members about is the increase in chargeback fees,” said David Fialkov, vice president of government relations for NATSO. “That applies to those who have and those who haven’t made the invest­ment in the appropriate equipment.”

Fialkov said the increase was ex­pected. “The liability for fraudulent transactions used to rest with the bank. Now it rests with our mem­bers, and they have no way to miti­gate it,” he said.

Mallory Duncan, vice president and general counsel at the National Retail Federation, said more needs to be done to protect retailers. Spe­cifically, he said that the U.S. credit card industry is refusing to replace the fraud-prone signatures used to ap­prove transactions with a far-more-se­cure personal identification number.

During The NATSO Show 2016, Fialkov and Duncan took part in a panel discussion with Chris Heinz, director of finance and operations at Coffee Cup Fuel Stops, to discuss how the transition was affecting operators. Stop Watch followed up with them to find out how the implementation is going now that it has been in place for one year. (See informaton on their session, EMV Shift: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, here.) 

Lack of Certifiers
The transition has been extremely complex and expensive for mer­chants, installing new equipment alone has cost between $30 and $35 billion, and many retailers who in­stalled new equipment have been unable to get it certified because of backlogs by credit card providers...