By John Adams
Rage at the very thought of upgrading point-of-sale systems to accept
EMV cards is becoming a theme among retailers sounding off in trade-show
panel discussions.
Just weeks ago, merchants complained bitterly at the Ramp Mobile Retail
Service conference in Chicago. Similar outcries arose even more recently
at Nacha’s Payments 2013 conference.
EMV cards, now common in other countries, improve security over
magnetic-stripe cards but aren’t compatible with many of the payment
terminals in U.S. stores today. Though the U.S. has long resisted
migrating to the EMV standard, the card networks established a timeframe
to urge most merchants to upgrade their hardware by October, 2015.
If merchants agree to switch, the card networks will lower certain
requirements to validate their compliance with the Payment Card Industry
data security standard. If merchants don’t switch, they take on more
liability for fraud.
The [card associations] chose to take the low road and do as little as
possible,” George Odencrantz, vice president of IT for Sinclair Oil
Corp., said at Nach. EMV’s about two decades old and doesn’t affect all
types of fraud, he noted. “If [EMV] addressed online transactions and
[totally removed] PCI compliance burdens, that may be different,” he
said.
The expense of the transition concerns retailers. It will cost about $40
million to upgrade Sinclair’s gas purchasing systems to accommodate EMV
cards. Because the company uses address verification as a security
measure, EMV cards don’t add to the security for the gas stations,
Odencrantz said. “We don’t think EMV will provide significant
protection,” he said.
Odencrantz was one of several merchants who spoke critically of EMV in
an energetic session at the Nacha event.
Gavin Waugh, vice president and assistant treasurer for Wendy’s, voiced
concerns about whether EMV-chip cards provide enough fraud protection to
be worth the cost of accepting them.
Wendy’s absorbs chargebacks for swiped card purchases under $25. Those
payments constitute a vast majority of Wendy’s business, Waugh said, and
fraud remains rare. “The fraud rate we ‘eat’ today is about one basis
point — so small it’s not worth measuring. It’s tough to figure out how
much the issuers are ‘eating,’ but we don’t think it moves the needle
that much.”
As merchants upgrade terminals to accept EMV cards, “the fast food
restaurants will get there, but they won’t be on the leading edge,”
Waugh said.
The first of a number of card network deadlines for the switch to EMV
has passed, and the networks are reporting progress among issuers, while
merchants are hitting the conference circuit to make sure their concerns
are heard.
“One thing to understand is EMV is not being mandated,” said Rue
Jenkins, assistant vice president in the treasury department at Costco.
Costco is already absorbing chargeback fraud, and there’s not adequate
information on how costly the fraud liability shift will be compared to
the cost of the EMV transition, Jenkins said.
Switching to EMV cards in Canada took as much as 10 years, while the
U.S. timeframe is about three years.
“When we did [the] EMV rollout at our warehouses in Canada, it was
painful, but not as painful as it will be in the U.S.,” Jenkins said.
“We are concerned that the standards will only solve card-present fraud.
We sell a lot of items on Costco.com, including $200,000 diamonds that
were purchased with a credit card.”
Whatever path merchants take, they can’t eliminate fraud altogether, and
many predict it will move to card-not-present channels.
Citing the Canadian Bankers Association, Claudia Swendseid, senior vice
president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said changing to
EMV in that country decreased card-present fraud.
At the same time, card-not-present fraud spiked. Swendseid did not
directly attribute the increase to EMV — but it’s something to keep in
mind, she said.