PROVIDENCE, R.I. — In the credit/debit card arena, Oct. 15, 2015, is D-Day. That's when card issuers will be held responsible for fraud-related charges for cards issued without an EMV chip.
Though the date is still a year away, many CUs are being proactive.
"We are in the extremely early processes of migrating to EMV because our processors are not ready yet, but we have sat in on several industry webinars and have had phone conversations with our representatives from Shoreline about EMV readiness," said People's Credit Union's EVP & Chief Operating Officer Amy Martel.
Martel referenced Shoreline, a Gemalto company. The latter is headquartered in France. Together the firms are reinforcing the CU's portfolio of personalization services by offering the AllAboutMe picture card solution.
Bertrand Knopf, senior vice president of Secure Transactions for North America at Gemalto, said this new campaign will accompany the ramp-up of EMV migration in the U.S.
"Recently we are seeing a lot of questions and inquiries from our customer base about EMV migration," said Knopf adding that the company serves more than 1,500 clients most of which are CUs. "The readiness of the processors is a key milestone for migration."
To date, the solution has been deployed to 230 clients worldwide. Knopf said these clients have average increases of 54% in card activation and 68% in card usage. Stateside, Shoreline and Gemalto are currently developing new offers for present and future customers — like People's CU — that will provide a platform for a "seamless integration" of their existing card system to EMV.
"The idea is to simplify the process for credit unions to accept and migrate to EMV," said Knopf.
In June, Aite Group released its research report "EMV: Lessons Learned and the U.S. Outlook," which found that 70% of credit cards and 41% of debit cards in the U.S. will be EMV enabled by end of 2015.
For the general public at large, the concept of EMV is foreign — with Target security breaches and the like, they just want to know their card is safe to use.
"Honestly, we have heard nothing from our members about EMV — nothing. We get a lot of press on our side, but I don't think the public has gotten enough press on this issue," said Martel. "There isn't a wide-scaled knowledge on chip and pin to the lay person unless they are a person who frequently travels outside the U.S."
Personalization Is A Draw
What draws members to the issue of EMV is the concept of personalizing their card, and making that card top of wallet. "A lot of members didn't like our new debit card; it was a plain green card," said Martel.
Only offering debit and ATM cards, the "green" card was a result of a core banking system conversion, which included card production applications. "That process took nearly two years," said Martel adding that the CU currently supports 17,126 debit cards. "I don't expect the EMV process to take that long. I think it will be more like six months to one year."
Prior to the conversion, the $400 million Peoples CU, with six branches, issued debit cards that included pictures of local monuments and the CU's 30,000 members appreciated that approach. "It's all about making the member experience more personal," said Martel.
AllAboutMe leverages the card customization in software-as-a-service (SaaS) from Gemalto and Shoreline provides a one-stop service for personalization and order fulfillment, noted Knopf.
"Shoreline has been providing card personalization solutions to the U.S. financial industry for more than 25 years and our strong experience will benefit our customers as they transition to EMV," said Knopf. "As part of the Gemalto network of personalization bureaus in the U.S, which creates one of the largest footprints in North America, Shoreline provides a local service to issue their customers EMV payment cards."
Due to yet-to-be-determined EMV migration costs, People's CU has not yet decided if it will do a mass reissue of its debit cards or a phased approach, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.
"We are at the mercy of the network processors before we can do anything with EMV, but we have heard that our processor may be able to start accepting EMV cards as early as June of next year," said Martel.
