Visa Sets EMV Liability Deadline for ATMs, Opens up Chip Technology (Feb. 5, 2013)
Feb. 5, 2013
Visa Inc. has taken two more steps forward in the U.S. transition toward EMV by setting new deadlines and liability shift dates for third-party ATM acquirers and announcing that it would provide some of its proprietary EMV chip technology to debit card issuers free of charge to facilitate chip adoption industry-wide and to support compliance with the Durbin Amendment’s network non-exclusivity rules.
Under Visa’s new deadlines, U.S. third-party ATM acquirer processors and sub-processors must support cards with EMV chip technology by April 1, 2015. ATM acquirers in Asia-Pacific nations other than China, India, Japan and Thailand have until Oct. 1, 2015, to comply with EMV standards, while the liability shift for ATMs in those four countries and the U.S. is Oct. 1, 2017. Visa, which was the first of the four major card networks to establish a road map for the U.S. switch to EMV, already has implemented liability shifts in Europe, Canada and Latin America, among other regions.
Visa said it also will make some of its chip technology available in conjunction with a generic, unbranded Application Identifier (AID) “to provide the most flexibility for issuers to manage their card portfolios over time, while facilitating merchant choice for transaction routing and delivering a faster, simpler, more cost-effective implementation.” Merchants will be able to continue to route debit transactions to their network of choice as they can with magnetic stripe transactions today, according to Visa. Issuers will continue to have the flexibility to change debit networks without having to re-issue cards. In addition, this approach will enable debit networks that do not have their own EMV chip solutions to support debit chip card transactions through Visa’s technology. All transactions can be routed to the appropriate network using the same methodology used in today’s magnetic stripe environment. Visa also said it will make its technology and generic U.S. debit AID available to support ATM transactions.
