Taking the lead in calling for a delay in the EMV implementation timeline for ATMs in the United States, an industry trade group, the National ATM Council (NAC) laid out its reasoning in a letter to MasterCard this week:
The letter requests that the Maestro card liability shift in the U.S. be delayed until:
- Formulation of a universally accepted AID (Application Identifier) consistent with financial transaction network routing requirements established under the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
- Adequate time is provided for the ATM industry to test and deploy the AID, and all related hardware and software upgrades and change outs necessary to render the embedded U.S. ATM base of over 425,000 terminals EMV compliant.
In addition, the organization said the current MasterCard guidelines aren’t clear as to the actual liability shift dates and further, that there are now two final deadlines (October 2016 for MasterCard and October 2017 for Visa) which create even more disruption in an already contentious environment.
Deadlines aside, the underlying issue is legal pre-emption and in this case, we would presume that Federal law will trump membership contracts at some point, forcing the card networks to offer an agnostic solution to the U.S. industry for dual-network debit transaction routing as part of an EMV region-specific set of specifications. Doing so, however, could open the door for other dual network routing schemes to take hold in other regions worldwide and neither network would welcome that kind of change.
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