Should Merchants Become EMV Compliant?
Absolutely!! The issuing bank, your acquirer and your payment processor have all migrated to EMV. Here’s what happens when you don’t have an EMV-capable terminal or POS Systems in the post-EMV era:
A patron uses a magnetic-stripe card at your business to buy $200 worth of goods. Upon reconciling your receipts for the day, you are notified that the goods were purchased with a counterfeit card, resulting in a fraudulent purchase. The issuer, acquirer and payment processor each have migrated to an EMV system, and your business is the only part of the chain that hasn’t migrated. Because of that, your older, non-EMV terminal didn’t catch the counterfeiter. Because your business is the weakest link in the payment chain, you’re responsible for assuming the $200 fraudulent cost.
You might be wondering, in this case, how the rest of the payment chain can catch the counterfeiter and you can’t. That’s because data that is copied from an EMV-chipped card won’t be recognized by a terminal that isn’t EMV-capable.
If the counterfeiter pulls credit-card information from the magnetic stripe of an EMV-chipped card, then that information contains a marker that says it was taken from an EMV-enabled card. So when that information is passed through the magnetic-stripe reader of an EMV-enabled terminal, the terminal itself can catch the counterfeit card and refuse the transaction on the spot.
Your customers are getting more educated on chip cards these days and if they see that you’re not accepting their chip cards by utilizing EMV Technology they might decline to do business with you.