Why Does The U.S. Need To Transition To EMV Payment Technology?

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

As a retail IT VAR, you know as of Oct. 1, liability for fraudulent payment card transactions shifts from card issuers to the party with the least EMV-compliant technology — which could be your merchant client. Some of your clients could still be asking, beyond the liability shift, why the transition is necessary.

At Retail Solutions Providers Association (RSPA) RetailNOW 2015, held Aug. 2 to 5 at Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Orlando, FL, Jeremy Gumbley, CTO of Creditcall, explained the primary reasons for your clients to adopt EMV are fraud reduction and security.

Gumbley explained that devices criminals use to skim credit cards “are very cheap and the data on the card is very static so I can take a magnetic stripe card, copy that, and make a hundred copies of it.”

EMV cards, however, use a unique, one-time code — an activation cryptogram — generated with each transaction. Gumbley commented, “I don’t think there is recorded instance of them being counterfeited, copied, or skimmed.”

“De-incentivizing criminals and hackers is a great way of reducing fraud, and EMV gets around that by making chip cards virtually impossible to be counterfeited or copied,” he said.

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