The U.S. Payments Forum has released its fall 2016 market snapshot of the status of U.S. chip migration, its effect on the U.S. market, and priorities and new resources for moving the transition forward.

State of the market

The forum cited research findings from Strawhecker Group research and others showing that 29 percent of U.S. merchants are now enabled to accept chip cards and about three-quarters of consumers have at least one chip card in their wallet.

Still, said the forum's director, Randy Vanderhoof, the U.S. will need to reach critical mass with chip-on-chip transactions before achieving a significant drop in counterfeit card fraud.

"As merchant enablement continues through the rest of this year and into next year, I expect to see chip-on-chip transactions become a bigger proportion of overall transactions," he said. "As a forum, we are working to identify pain points with the EMV migration and address issues to help move merchant enablement forward, and help the industry reach the goal of widespread chip card acceptance to remove counterfeit fraud from the system more quickly.".

The 'anniversary' of EMV

October is a significant month for EMV migration in the United States. The merchant liability shift deadline fell in October 2015, the MasterCard shift for ATMs occurring four days from now, and a final shift next October covering the remaining card brands at ATMs and all major brands at fuel dispensers.

Moving chip implementation forward

Merchants — new publications from the forum address options to improve EMV transaction speed, best practices for managing chargebacks, and changes to the minimum requirements for merchants affected by the faster EMV specifications from the payment brands.

ATM industry —  the forum and its ATM working committee are taking action to provide implementation guidance and other resources for small banks, credit unions and independent ATM owners to ensure the efficient, effective implementation of EMV chip card acceptance at ATMs.

The committee has developed a workshop series, "Implementing EMV at the ATM,"  based on the white paper, "Implementing EMV at the ATM: Requirements and Recommendations for the U.S. ATM Community." 

Petroleum industry — the petroleum working group is focused on providing implementation guidance to help the industry prepare for October 2017 liability shifts. Two areas of concentration for the group include addressing commonly asked questions about the migration, and the issuance and acceptance of chip-enabled fleet cards.

Additional merchant segments — the forum will continue to provide education and guidance for merchants who have not completed their implementation or are working out further related challenges.

New and emerging payment technologies — the forum's other priorities in upcoming months will include discussions and work group activities addressing new and emerging payments technologies in the U.S., such as tokenization, mobile and contactless payments, card-not-present transactions and point-to-point encryption, among others.

Resource Recap

Resources introduced over the past quarter to provide EMV implementation guidance and optimization approaches include:

• "Optimizing Transaction Speed at the Point of Sale," a white paper detailing approaches to help speed up EMV chip transactions and their potential impact on stakeholders within the U.S. payments ecosystem;
• "EMV Chargeback Best Practices" a white paper that provides guidelines for ensuring proper authorization, as well as avoiding and mitigate invalid chargebacks;
• an EMV Minimum Requirements matrix outlining minimum requirements of EMV chip deployment for various payment networks, with recent updates covering faster EMV solutions the major card brands; and
• on-demand access to "Best Practices in Support of EMV Instant Issuance," a webinar recording that details implementation and best practices for development of an EMV instant issuance program.

Additional U.S. Payments Forum resources are available at www.emv-connection.com