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No matter what’s in your wallet, you’ll be able to buy the same things on Friday as you can on Thursday, the day when the credit card landscape shifts in the United States toward a more data secure future. Most cardholders won’t notice the difference right away, but eventually, all will have new chip-enabled credit and debit cards.
According to an AP-GfK poll, only one in 10 Americans have received the new cards that major companies are demanding. Of those with the chip, only one out of three have used the cards in their intended manner in a specialized reader.
In an effort to push the United States toward the European norm of security chip-enabled credit and debit cards, Visa, MasterCard and other payment processors have spent years preparing cardholders to make the transition from standard magnetic strip cards. In 2012, credit card companies set an Oct. 1 deadline for merchants. After the soft-deadline, if a merchant approves a fraudulent transaction on a terminal that hasn’t been updated to a chip-reading model, the fault of that transaction lies with the merchant.
“This liability shift was in the works two to three years ago. It’s just those highly publicized breaches have publicized the movement,” said Andy Allard, vice president and chief operating officer at IU Credit Union, referring to events like the data security breach experienced by Target in 2013. “It essentially says that if a member presents a card to a merchant that has equipment that can’t process the chip, and there’s fraud activity, the merchant bears the liability.”
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