The April 1 deadline for U.S. acquirer processors to accept EMV smart-card payments has come and gone, with Visa Inc. reporting that most companies have made it.
The deadline, which Visa established in August 2011, requires acquirer processors and sub-processor service providers to support EMV chip-based transactions, in a format that works with the VisaNet Integrated Payment System.
MasterCard followed suit, with an April deadline for processor infrastructure readiness.
Neither card brand required processors to develop the capacity by April 1 to handle Near Field Communication payments.
That lack of an NFC requirement adds to the uncertainty surrounding NFC technology, some observers say. They also note that not many mobile devices have NFC capabilities.
NFC aside, the April 1 deadline does not carry a liability shift, the key facet of a separate October, 2015 deadline for merchants.
With April’s deadline the card brands essentially decreed that processors were required to certify “their ability to comply with this mandate.”
Processors could satisfy that certification process by completing a test with Visa.
In a prepared statement, Visa said this week that the deadline represents “another important step” toward the goal of accelerating EMV adoption in the United States.
“Acquirer processors representing the vast majority of U.S. face-to-face sales volume have completed Visa’s mandated requirements, and we are working actively with the remaining acquirer processors to help them complete this process,” Visa said in the statement.
But much work remains undone in America’s transition to EMV smart card acceptance, observers contend.
For the switch to EMV technology standards to succeed, merchants should become more active in pursuing upgrades at the point of sale, according to Richard Crone, chief executive of San Carlos, Calif.-based payments consulting firm Crone Consulting LLC.
“It’s been a slow slog here in North America to get EMV in place, and the merchants are not motivated to do this now because there is no return on the investment in their minds,” Crone tells ISO&Agent Weekly.
In that regard, the growth of mobile payments provides merchants the opportunity to “get rid of EMV altogether and not wait for issuers to circulate cards,” Crone says. In other words, the nation could leave out EMV in what some perceive as a progression toward the dominance of mobile payments.
In Visa’s view, however, the payments industry can’t skip steps to speed up the process.
“The acquirer processor mandate is necessary for the successful migration to EMV,” Visa maintained in its written statement, “as it ensures that the processing infrastructure is in place to support EMV chip transactions, and we are pleased with the strong completion rates we are seeing.”
Meanwhile, the EMV transition has taken on a mantle of inevitability in some quarters.
Some ISOs, for example, are busily preparing sales agents to alert their merchant clients to EMV cards’ enhanced security, which can ease the burden of complying wih the Payment Card Industry data security standards. (Related article on page 19.)
MasterCard Inc. did not respond to inquiries for this story by deadline.
