This week’s edition of ISO&Agent leads with a story on the fast approaching deadline for migration to the Europay MasterCard Visa chip-card standard in the United States, and the relative unpreparedness of the nation’s card acceptance infrastructure.
While the article indicates Visa has stated the April 1, 2013 date is firm for the shift of liability on counterfeit fraud from compliant issuers to non-compliant merchants, many in the industry think that we won’t be ready. Among them is Stewart Chalmers of EMV Academy:
“The ability to meet that deadline is just nonexistent,” Chalmers says. “Nobody is anywhere near it.”
He joins a host of executives who participated in the EMV transition in the United Kingdom, Canada and other countries in predicting the U.S. payments industry will not be ready in time for the transition from magnetic stripe cards to EMV chip cards.
MasterCard did not provide a comment about the April deadline.
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