EMV’s Big Cardholder Education Gap

JAVELIN released a report on Wednesday (June 24) that examined the state of awareness and readiness among EMV card users. And though the industry itself may be lurching toward the Oct. 2015 deadline, the opportunity is still there for education.

Recent headlines have focused on the state of merchants in the U.S. in terms of readiness to meet the Oct. 2015 EMV deadline to begin accepting and processing payments using the chip-enabled cards. But the JAVELIN report, titled “State of EMV Cardholders: Opportunities to Capitalize on the Halo Effect,” takes a different tack, focusing instead on users themselves, and specifically the differences between EMV and non-EMV cardholders.

JAVELIN is a unit of Greenwich Associates that conducts market research focusing on customer transactions tied to financial institutions and payments companies.

Of those surveyed — which included 8,500 U.S. retail bank customers questioned by JAVELIN in Nov. 2014 — 7 percent said they learned about EMV from their financial institution via printed material, which in turn informed them as to why the chip was there and what it was for. However, respondents indicated that printed communication remained the least effective way of conveying this information.

Other education channels included decidedly higher tech avenues such as text messages, mobile banking apps and call centers.

The study also found that EMV cardholders “have a far better perception” of their primary financial institution than do their non-EMV cardholding brethren.

“Neglecting cardholder education on EMV is a squandered opportunity for banks to shine. The halo effect from EMV will not last long — only a few short years — because of the normalization process of EMV in the public domain,” said Nick Holland, head of payments for JAVELIN. “For [financial institutions] to capture consumer attention, they need to proactively educate across a variety of media.”

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