Three-Quarters of Retailers Aren’t EMV-Ready at Checkout

BOSTON — Only 22 percent of retailers are equipped to process new EMV cards at the checkout lanes of their stores, according to a new special report from Boston Research Partners (BRP).

EMV cards have an embedded chip, which is a small metal square on the front of the card that adds a higher level of security to the transaction when used in chip-enabled terminals. 

According to the new BRP report, entitled Payment/Data Security in an Omni-Channel World, 38 percent of retailers indicate that payment/data security is a top priority and 53 percent of them say they plan to deploy and activate chip-enabled terminals within the next 12 months.

This special report is based on insights gained from BRP’s 2016 POS/Customer Engagement Survey and highlights the payment security objectives and challenges facing leading retailers today. Specifically, the report addresses topics such as: EMV compliance progress, alternative payment type adoption, payment card processing architecture approaches, and the increased shift to online fraud.

“Hackers and fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated, requiring retailers to reanalyze and revamp their current security protocols in order to adequately protect the interests of themselves and their customers,” said Perry Kramer, vice president and practice lead for Boston Retail Partners. “The good news is that retailers realize the magnitude of payment risks and continue to focus resources to lock-down payment and data security across all touchpoints.”

The use of EMV-compliant payment solutions weakens the incentive for thieves to steal credit card information by requiring that the physical card be present at the transaction.

“[But] EMV adoption in and of itself does not do anything to actually reduce the risk of a breach,” noted Ryan Grogman, vice president at Boston Retail Partners. “The most effective approach for securing payment card transactions is a multi-tiered approach, which includes implementing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and tokenization in addition to support for EMV.”

EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa — the three companies that originally created the security standard.