Visa Supports Acceleration Of EMV Chip Migration

Visa Inc. V revealed a series of steps to help speed up EMV chip migration for merchants. According to the company, it streamlined its testing requirements, amended and simplified the terminal certification process. It also committed to investing further resources and technical expertise in a manner, which could slash timeframes by a maximum of 50 percent.

Visa indicated it was also making policy changes to help limit exposure to counterfeit fraud liability for merchants who are not yet chip-ready.

The company's Group Executive for North America, Oliver Jenkyn, commented, "Visa recognizes the importance of having the industry help merchants get their chip terminal solutions up and running quickly so that everyone, especially consumers, can benefit from the powerful security protection of chip technology. We've taken steps to simplify the process as much as possible and help reduce any challenges so merchants can move forward with chip adoption quickly."

Visa disclosed that before a merchant could turn on a new chip terminal, it required to be tested to ensure it works properly for the merchant, as well as, cardholder. Chip technology could be implemented in different ways depending up on the unique requirements of a merchant, and therefore, different merchants need to be tested in different ways.

The card processor also said that while the U.S. migration to chip technology was a significant undertaking, tremendous progress were made to-date with more than 300 million chip cards in market and 1.2 million merchant locations now accepting chip cards.

The company indicated that an average of 23,000 new merchant locations become chip-ready every week. The company said that despite the success to date, a migration of this size takes time and hence several merchants still required help to cross the finish line.