With Small Merchants Lagging, Visa Embarks on EMV Education Tour to Hit Basics

As the U.S. payment card industry migrates to EMV chip cards, there’s one group to which the payments industry needs to pay special attention. Smaller merchants have little awareness of what EMV is and how their businesses will be affected by it.

That’s why Visa Inc. set out Friday on a 20-city EMV tour, with the first stop in Austin, Texas. The Small Business Chip Education Tour is designed to help small-business owners understand the basics—what chip card technology is and how it works.

According to one survey, more than 70% of small merchants, are unaware of EMV and its attendant liability shift, which becomes effective Oct. 1. The party to a general-purpose credit or debit card transaction that doesn’t support EMV chip cards, be it the issuer or merchant, will bear liability for any resulting counterfeit fraud.

More than half of small-business locations are not prepared for EMV, says VeriFone Systems Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based POS device maker. VeriFone estimates that only 22% of what the company believes are 6.8 million lanes in small- and medium-size locations supported EMV late last year, and close to 40% will by the October 2015 liability shift.

By comparison, VeriFone forecasts 90% of the top 200 retailers will be EMV ready in October.

Visa’s tour, which includes stops at local chamber of commerce meetings, will move on to Orlando, Fla., next. A full list of locations was not available.

The program includes presentations from payments experts and merchants that already have migrated to the new technology, along with demonstrations.

While many larger merchants already are prepared for EMV—given their larger budgets, staff, and technology—smaller merchants are expected to lag. Many of them may presume they have less card fraud exposure, and they may not have the budget to make the point-of-sale terminal upgrade.