IDG Contributor Network: The retail EMV quagmire
Retailers have this love-hate relationship with EMV, in that they love to hate EMV. It's slow, cumbersome, alienates customers and until a store fully deploys it, the liability shift is expensive. There's also a reasonable argument that the liability shift is not fair to merchants, since they are being punished for something that is often out of their control.
With that in mind, it's easy to understand why major retailers — Walmart last month and Home Depot last week — are suing Visa and MasterCard in an attempt to fight chip cards any way they can.
Of course, the retail argument isn't quite phrased that way. The party line is that the litigation is aimed not at stopping EMV but in making it more secure, by way of insisting on PIN authentication instead of the existing signature authentication.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here