“The global shortage of semiconductors that has impacted myriad industries that use the chips, from automakers and electronics manufacturers to defense contractors and even soap manufacturers, is poised to affect payment card manufacturers, the Smart Payment Association announced Monday.  Bottlenecks in the chip card supply have become so acute that payment card manufacturers face increasing difficulties in obtaining the chips needed to produce cards, the SPA says. As a result, chip card manufacturers can expect hiccups in their production capacity to continue throughout 2022, the SPA says. More than 3 billion EMV-standard based payment cards need to be produced and delivered annually to consumers worldwide, according to the SPA.”

“Data published by EMVCo shows that at the end of 2020, 10.8 billion EMV® chip cards were in global circulation – an increase of nearly 1 billion compared to the previous twelve months. In addition, EMVCo reports that 66% of issued cards are EMV, with over 86% of all card-present transactions conducted globally using EMV chip technology. In this Q&A post, Junya Tanaka, EMVCo Executive Committee Chair, explains the role of EMV chip in supporting the delivery of reliable and convenient payments globally.”

“NACS, along with Energy Marketers of America, the National Association of Truck Stop Operators and the Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America, have requested a delay of the deadline for the upcoming EMV liability shift  for automated fuel dispensers to October 2021. The requests were sent to American Express , Discover , Mastercard , Visa , Voyager and WEX .”

“With gas stations and convenience stores feeling the economic pinch from the slowdown in sales caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and uncertainty over the economy, Transaction Network Services Inc. announced a new pricing structure to help cut station owners’ telecom-network installation costs for EMV at the pump. Transaction Networks Services (TNS) will defer monthly payments at the start of a multiyear contract for the installation of telecom systems that enable the point-of-sale system to communicate with in-pump EMV card readers .”

“New data from ACI Worldwide, a leading global provider of real-time digital payment software and solutions, highlights that as of July 2020, nearly 50 percent (47%) of major fuel merchants are unprepared to meet EMV automated fuel dispenser (AFD) compliance by the new April 2021 deadline (extended from October 2020) with less than half their stores fully upgraded. The survey indicated that 33 percent are unlikely to meet the April 2021 deadline, at which point fraud liability is expected to shift from card issuers to fuel merchants.”

“Chip-based credit and debit cards are designed to make it infeasible for skimming devices or malware to clone your card when you pay for something by dipping the chip instead of swiping the stripe. But a recent series of malware attacks on U.S.-based merchants suggest thieves are exploiting weaknesses in how certain financial institutions have implemented the technology to sidestep key chip card security features and effectively create usable, counterfeit cards.”

“The U.S. Payments Forum is continuing to provide the U.S. with essential guidance on the migration to EMV chip with a new white paper on options for supporting fallback transactions in the petroleum environment. The resource released today defines fallback and covers processing magnetic stripe transactions for card programs that are not supported on the contact EMV interface of automatic fuel dispenser (AFD) terminals.”

“Four years after the EMV chip card standard became the law of the U.S. payments land, the number of credit and debit cards with an EMV chip now exceeds 1 billion, and 63% of U.S. card-present transactions in 2019 involved an EMV card being read by an EMV-capable terminal, up from 53.5% in 2018. Those numbers are some of the highlights in a report released Thursday by EMVCo, the standards body owned by the global card networks. The U.S. EMV credit and debit card count was 1.07 billion as of 2019’s fourth quarter, an increase of 232 million, or nearly 28%, from 842 million in late 2018.”

“Visa has published a new infographic that revealed a 76% decline in counterfeit fraud from December 2015 to December 2017 due to increased EMV chip cards and chip-enabled merchants in the US. The company noted that it registered growth across the number of chip cards and chip-enabled merchants, payment and transaction volume even during the most recent period ending in March 2018.”