Ingenico Group Industry Insights from EMV expert, Allen Friedman
How concerned are merchants and merchant service providers about meeting the EMV migration deadline in the US?
Last year during Money2020, there were still a lot of people who thought the liability shift dates would be pushed out or done away with. In the ensuing year, because of a lot of things that happened in the marketplace, that’s not going to happen. The card brands made it very clear that that would not happen, and this year there’s not as much discussion about EMV. There are still some mentions in some of the panel discussions about EMV, but in the exhibit hall there’s not as much discussion about it. I believe that’s partly because the players here that are involved in EMV, transaction processing and payment presentment already have their solutions or they know what their solutions are going to be. So there’s not the need for as much conversation or as many comments.
In a lot of the booths they may be saying that they have EMV solutions or that they don’t need them because they’re not using cards, and that’s a good thing. The fact that the people here are far enough along in EMV that they don’t have to be talking about it and discussing it and conferring is great. These are mostly all vendors to the payments industry.
From a merchant perspective, and there are a lot of merchant attendees not exhibiting, a lot of them have questions. A lot of merchants are still unprepared. Of the very largest merchants, I think probably 80-90% of them will be done with EMV conversions and production at the end of next year. Or if they don’t make the liability shift, they will be within a few months of it. And small merchants who use their acquirer’s point of sale devices, preprogramed devices, may be in a better position than the middle tier of merchants. The medium sized merchants rely a lot on third party system integrators who are not ready for the most part. There are a lot of questions coming from them, there’s a lot of interest, but they’re not as far along as they really need to be. We think that they are going to be the long tail of this issue and they’re going to be the ones that will go into 2016, and start solving that issue and implementing EMV during 2016.
Allen Friedman is the Director of Payment Solutions at Ingenico Group, North America
