Beware The October Revolution

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There's a new revolution coming-and, for many small business owners, it forebodes a financial fiasco with regard to credit card fraud liability.

That's because on October 1, 2015, payment card fraud that could have been avoided through the use of a Chip/Smart Card EMV Terminal will become an expense to your business-rather than to the credit card issuer.

In other words, you-not Visa, Master Card, American Express, or Discover Card-will bear the burden for fraudulent card use. Wow. Talk about a revolution…

It's All About EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa)

To further enhance the security for authenticating credit and debit card transactions, EMV is a global standard for the interoperability of EMV-compliant integrated circuit cards (IC cards or "chip cards") and EMV-compliant credit card Through the use of chip-based cards, compared to magnetic stripe card transactions that rely on the holder's signature and visual inspection of the card to check for features such as hologram, EMV chip card transactions improve security against fraud. The use of a PIN and cryptographic algorithms such as Triple-DES, RSA, and SHA provide authentication of the chip card to the processing terminal and to the card issuer's host system.

In addition, EMV allows for e-purse payments (e.g., Apple Pay and Google Wallet) via NFC (Near Field Communications) a secure, very short-range wireless communication technology that lets two NFC-enabled devices (your smartphone and/or EMC card and NFC-capable POS terminals) exchange information.

EMV Card Distribution

By the end of 2015, 70% of all U.S. credit cards (and 41% of all U.S. debit cards) will be EMV-enabled.

What This Means For The Business Owner

The increased protection from fraud has allowed banks and credit card issuers to push through a 'liability shift' such that merchants will be held liable (from October 1, 2015) for any fraud that results from transactions on systems that are not EMV capable.

What You Need to Do...and When

To protect your most valuable asset-your business-from the liability for card payment fraud, you MUST upgrade your existing non-EMV compliant POS terminals to ones that are EMV-compliant. It's that easy.

And the time to upgrade is NOW. Here's why:

1. You can begin accepting EMV cards and mobile wallet payments immediately
2. You can avoid a likely EMV terminal shortage as 10/1/15 draws closer
3. You will be demonstrating to your customers that cardholder data security is a top priority

The Bottom Line

The October Revolution is coming. Don't put off until then (or later) what you need to do TODAY. The solution-getting EMV-capable POS terminals for your business---is simple. And with it comes enhanced security and a world of future payment possibilities!