EMV (Europay, Mastercard, Visa) is finally hitting its stride in the United States. More than 600 million chip cards have been issued to U.S. consumers so far, and as of March 2017, roughly 39% of merchants were ready to adopt EMV. Small-to-medium businesses have had a slower transition compared to retailers like Target and Home Depot. Some giant retailers were among the first to migrate because of their largely publicized data breaches. Note that EMV does not protect the actual PAN data, it only authenticates the card being used and only encryption of the data at point of dip, swipe or tap can truly reduce the risk of card skimming. Additional factors that are still a barrier to EMV adoption include merchants’ expectations of high costs, slow certification, training requirements, and a belief that the risk of fraud is low enough already (mostly for lower fraud rate merchants such as restaurants and healthcare). Despite these issues, advancements are being made such as Visa’s Quick Chip program. This software update “enables customers to dip and remove their EMV chip card at checkout in about two seconds or less. They can even do so before the transaction is complete (while the salesperson is still ringing up the items).”
