TAMPA, Fla.—With just under 30 days remaining until the Oct. 1 liability shift deadline, card processors are reminding credit unions about the importance of starting member education now.
Tom Davis, CSCU
A recent CUToday.info report revealed that 59% of all merchants will be EMV ready by the end of 2015, as merchants have begun ramping up efforts as the Visa and MasterCard liability shift deadline approaches.
Collectively, CU card processors say the large majority of their credit card clients will be EMV ready by the end of the year, with debit generally trailing by 50%.
That leaves a third constituency that needs to be addressed.
“What will really become front and center, as merchants begin turning on their terminals, is cardholder education,” said Tom Davis, chief technology officer with CSCU.
Education To Drive EMV Adoption
Art Harper, director of solutions consulting at PSCU, St. Petersburg, Fla., added that consumer education is what will truly drive adoption and usage of chip cards.
Shazia Manus, TMG
Experts have pointed out that the CHIP In Education Initiative, a consumer education program recently introduced by the Payments Security Task Force and the EMV Migration Forum, will play a key role. CHIP IN provides issuers, merchants, acquirers, networks and others with common educational messages and materials that can be shared through social media and other channels.
Shazia Manus, CEO at The Members Group, Des Moines, Iowa, emphasized that getting cardholders schooled in the ways of EMV won’t be a simple task.
“Keep in mind that consumers, your members, have this muscle memory with swiping their cards, so it will take some time to replace that old memory with a new one,” said Manus about “dipping” the EMV card.
Manus said TMG has been advising clients about the importance of member education and providing them with educational tools that can be used in newsletters, on websites and in other applications.
“Much has to be done to get this shift in behavior engrained in members,” Manus said.
Muscle Memory
Michelle Thornton, CO-OP FS
Besides changing muscle memory, consumers will have to adjust to POS experiences that can differ among retailers.
“And the different EMV POS experiences may not just come from shopping at different merchants,” said TMG Product Manager Chole Casber, who noted that the payment experience could change based on time of day.
“Walmart is so advanced with their payment terminals that they can alter the way the CVM is executed based upon peak hours and non-peak hours. So they may pass you through with no signature or no PIN based on criteria and time to move the checkout lines faster during peak periods,” said Casber. “Whereas at slower times they may require a prompt for a signature or PIN for that payment. This will be truly unique and multifaceted and something to keep your eyes on.”
Michelle Thornton, manager of core products for CO-OP Financial Services, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., reminded that the education process and the entire U.S. conversion to EMV will take time.
“It will be a gradual process,” said Thornton. “In most countries this process took ten years, and for the U.S., which is much more complicated, to try to do it in three years is unrealistic.”