The Slow March Toward EMV Adoption in the U.S.

This week's news that Chase Paymentech is launching an EMV-enabled terminal is just the latest in the United States' seemingly inexorable march toward EMV.

The "Future Proof" terminal enables merchants to accept EMV (Europay, chip cards, as well as phone-based mobile wallets and other forms of contactless payments.

According to Chase, Merchants that accept EMV-chip cards with the Future Proof terminal, which supports both signature- and pin-based EMV transactions, can expect fewer chargebacks and may have no liability in the future for the cost of card fraud.

[See Also: Is EMV the New Metric System.]

Plans to implement EMV in the U.S. have been flying fast and furious in recent years. In May, Purchase, N.Y.-based MasterCard announced the formation of cross-industry group designed to foster collaboration and alignment between networks, issuers, merchants, acquirers, processors, terminal manufacturers, card manufacturers and other groups in the implementation of EMV technology in the United States.

Last August, San Francisco-based Visa also announced its own EMV roadmap, in hopes of accelerating the migration to EMV contact and contactless chip technology in the United States.

The Chase announcement is just the latest, and we can likely expect more EMV-related news in the future.

Bryan Yurcan is associate editor for Bank Systems and Technology. He has worked in various editorial capacities for newspapers and magazines for the past 8 years. After beginning his career as a municipal and courts reporter for daily newspapers in upstate New York, Bryan has ... View Full Bio