Posts Tagged ‘retail’

With the liability shift and October already here, where are all the EMV-compliant merchants? Many are still waiting for software updates. And why is that, given how many years everyone has known about the October 2015 cutover? Seems that the U.S. payments processing space is a lot more complicated than even the payment itself realized, according to Randy Vanderhoof, who, as executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, is the industry’s chief EMV cheerleader.

Vanderhoof concedes that most U.S. merchants—60-65 percent, he said—are not EMV compliant today and he blames that on several factors, but payments complexity—and good old-fashioned procrastination—are at the top of his list. “The U.S. market is the most complex payments processing market in the world because we have multiple parties involved in managing the retail POS systems and multiple parties engaged in the processing and acquiring of payment transactions,” Vanderhoof said. “In other countries, other markets, the major banks who were then issuers were also the acquirers so they owned the terminals in those merchant locations. They invested in the cards and the terminals and their own banking acquiring network. In the U.S., financial institutions are separated from the merchants and acquirers. This means that there needs to be independent investments and alignments.”