EMV transition involves many moving parts

The shift from magnetic stripe to chip-based payment cards was first announced in 2011, with a deadline of October 2015, but most merchants still have not upgraded, and are paying the price in that they are now having to cover the costs of fraudulent transactions.

According to EMVCo, the international consortium responsible for the EMV chip card standard, the U.S. also lags far behind other countries. In Africa and the Middle East, for example, 87 percent of in-personal payments were with chip cards, 40 percent in Asia, 72 percent in Eastern Europe, and 97 percent in Western Europe.

There’s a lot of finger pointing going around about why the transition is going so slowly, but the bottom line, according to experts, is that the United States has a more complicated infrastructure than other countries and the transition was never expected to happen quickly.

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