EMV’s First U.S. Birthday Not a Happy One

Just recently, we took note of the first anniversary of Samsung Pay, and recently, a similar event was celebrated by the Europay / Mastercard / Visa (EMV) system in the United States.

This birthday, however, was far from happy, and shows us that there’s a lot more ground to cover with this protective and somewhat annoying new technology.

The market has clearly embraced EMV on at least some level, particularly when it comes to larger retail organizations eager to take advantage of the protective measure involved.

However, even at that level, we’ve seen some issues around implementation, and problems with lengthy times to complete transactions, backed up by chargeback issues.

With 80 percent of US consumers currently in possession of chip cards, getting the infrastructure right to handle chip cards is vital to physical retail’s continued operations.

Worse, getting EMV certification has proven troublesome as the backlog now reportedly stretches back between two and four months. Efforts to streamline the process have been in place, but even major names like Visa and Mastercard-two of the process’ name-bearers-have something of a lack of qualified staff to handle the certifications.

With 260.3 million chargebacks estimated in the system, valued at a staggering combined figure of $5.8 billion, it’s getting to be a pure disaster for retailers.

Just to top off the litany of problems for EMV, 70 percent of small businesses still have no plans to switch to EMV, citing minimal card fraud-why switch over for protection against a problem that generally doesn’t happen-and a profound string of headaches to put it in place.

With better education and some incentive packages to improve the perceptions of uselessness and difficulty, this may change. The growth of partially-integrated solutions and near-field communications (NFC) systems may likewise help.

Essentially, we’re dealing with a system that has significant problems, several competitive alternatives, and a market that’s skeptical of its utility. Those aren’t good positions to be in individually, and occupying all three at once could be a disaster, especially with mobile payments systems readily available for most anyone with a recent smartphone.

EMV has to make its case, and in much greater fashion, in order to really get anywhere. Failing to do so will only leave this new protective measure as an also-ran in the face of mobile payments and straight cash.