Citing technological and regulatory challenges, Mastercard and Visa have postponed their liability deadlines for merchants to employ EMV chip card technology at automated fuel pumps, from October 2017 to October 2020.
Companies now have three more years to migrate from traditional magnetic stripe-based payment card scanners to chip reader technology before they would incur any financial liability for fraud perpetrated at the point of sale.
“Given the migration challenges for implementing EMV in the petroleum environment, Visa's and Mastercard's modification of the liability shift dates will be beneficial to the retail petroleum industry and the U.S. chip migration,” said Randy Vanderhoof, director of the U.S. Payments Forum, in a comment emailed to SC Media.
In a corporate statement explaining the new deadline, Mastercard acknowledged that retailers that sell fuel at automated pumps continue to face “significant regulatory and implementation challenges.” Visa, in its own statement, noted that more time was needed because of “the complicated infrastructure and specialized technology required for fuel pumps.” Also, “there are still issues with a sufficient supply of regulatory-compliant EMV hardware and software to enable most upgrades by 2017.”
