If your business accepts credit and debit cards at the point of sale, change is coming.How your customers pay has also been changing, with new types of cards and payment forms.You need to be ready with new technology to accept those payments — and protect your business in the process.

How Payment Forms Are Changing
In the past, cards would be swiped through your card terminal.Moving forward, customers will be using EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) enabled chip cards to pay.

Chip cards look like a regular plastic payment card, except they have a microchip embedded in them that greatly reduces the chances of the card being counterfeited. In other words, with chip cards, there’s less likelihood of counterfeit card fraud.Instead of swiping a chip card, the customer inserts the chip card into the point-of-sale terminal for the entire duration of the transaction.

Other forms of payment are increasingly being used by customers, as well.There are contactless cards, so instead of swiping or inserting the payment card into a chip card reader, the customer simply taps or waves that type of card in close proximity of the contactless reader. The transaction data is securely transferred wirelessly, making a fast and smooth transaction.

Mobile wallets, such as Apple Pay, are also growing in popularity. Customers pay by placing their smartphones next to a contactless reader to complete the transaction.

Why is This Change Important to My Business?
This October 1st marks an important date for small businesses that accept credit and debit cards at the point of sale.

On October 1, 2015, the Payment Brands such as Visa, MC, Discover and American Express will be implementing a “liability shift.” That means the party (issuer, acquirer or merchant) that did the least to prevent card-present fraud from a technology standpoint will now bear the responsibility for certain types of fraud, such as counterfeit and possibly lost/stolen fraud.

What can you do to avoid being the liable party once this liability shift takes place?

One solution is to have payment technology in place that accepts these new forms of customer payment, especially the chip cards.Implementing new payment readers for chip technology will help protect your business against liability for counterfeit and potentially lost/stolen fraud after October 1st.

EMV chip technology adds security to ‘card-present’ transactions, meaning the cardholder is there in person presenting the card for payment.

According to Deanna Karhuniemi, EMV product manager for Chase Commerce Solutions, “What the new chip technology is solving is that it mitigates the instance of counterfeit card fraud.”For the fraud mitigation to be effective, both the card issuer and the business must have EMV technology in place.

“EMV is a security technology that effectively makes each ‘card present’ transaction unique. EMV security technology makes that transaction data useless to anyone trying to copy that transaction data or intercept it somehow and try to use it to create a counterfeit card,” explained Karhuniemi.

By: DocMemory
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