Visa Gives Merchants Online EMV Adoption Toolkit

When it comes to EMV chip-enabled technology, getting merchants up to speed is the first step into making businesses EMV-compliant by the Oct. 1 deadline.

To help smooth that transition, Visa announced yesterday (May 4) it has launched an online toolkit aimed at helping small business owners make the switchover. The online kit offers a 10-step guide for merchants to understand how to implement the technology, tools and resources to know how to do so, and a training guide on how to train employees to better understand accepting chip cards at the POS.

“Chip technology will bring an important new layer of security for credit and debit cards by helping to make stolen account information useless to criminals,” said Stephanie Ericksen, Vice President of Risk Products for Visa, in a news release. “It is a priority to increase merchant awareness and understanding, given a liability shift in October 2015, after which merchants who are not ready to accept chip cards may be responsible for counterfeit fraud.”

A survey released yesterday from the Payments Security Task force estimates that the U.S. shift to chip cards will be close to complete by 2017. The eight financial institutions involved in the task force estimate that 63 percent of their credit and debit cards will be EMV-chip enabled by the end of 2015. That figure is estimated to grow to 98 percent by the end of 2017. While a number of merchants expected to make the EMV switch, a recent Aite Group study shows that a third of merchants were unfamiliar with chip-enabled technology.

Visa’s announcement came at the start of U.S. Small Business Administration’s National Small Business Week. Visa will continue on its Small Business Chip Education Tour that involves collaborating with local chambers of commerce, financial institutions and payment providers to help merchants become educated on the EMV chip-enabled technology.

Through these initiatives, Visa hopes to help small businesses better understand the security benefits of chip-enabled cards and help merchants fully understand how the technology works. Visa is also offering more than 10,000 U.S. financial institutions customizable marketing materials to help share more educational materials about the subject.