EMV Readiness – A Cautionary Tale

EMV Chip Card Hotel

 

We’re now way beyond the October 2015 deadline for EMV and, while many hotels and businesses have made the move to accommodate chip cards as EMV, not every business has upgraded to the new chip readers and processing technology.

For those that have not adopted EMV, the banks have shifted responsibility for any fraudulent chip-card transactions to you, the merchant.  This may not sound like a large burden when compared with the investment in moving to EMV, but hotels should be aware that this responsibility can quickly become expensive.

Recently we were speaking to a hotel that experienced a $2,000 dispute over a charge.  Their claim was denied because they did not have EMV devices in place and could not process chip cards as EMV.

We encourage all of our SMS clients to upgrade to SMS|Host v20.1+ and our Secure Payment Solution (SPS).  This is the ideal opportunity to implement EMV capable card readers while moving to the more secure Point-to-Point encryption.  SMS and Shift4 collectively support multiple manufacturers’ devices capable of processing both Chip & PIN and magnetic swiped transactions.

Please contact your SMS Account Manager for any questions you might have about upgrading and being EMV ready to protect yourself against claims and disputes.