Visa Delays EMV Activation Date For Automated Fuel Dispensers

Visa announced Thursday (Dec. 1) it has decided to delay the U.S. domestic automated fuel dispenser (AFD) EMV activation date from Oct. 1, 2017, to Oct. 1, 2020. In a blog post, Visa said the EMV liability shift at ATMs will still take effect as planned on Oct. 1, 2017.

According to Visa, while it remains committed to moving businesses to chip technology as fast as possible, it recognizes that some industries face unique challenges in migrating to the technology. The fuel segment in particular has its own unique challenges, said Visa.

“We knew that the AFD segment would need more time to upgrade to chip because of the complicated infrastructure and specialized technology required for fuel pumps. For instance, in some cases, older pumps may need to be replaced before adding chip readers, requiring specialized vendors and breaking into concrete,” wrote Visa. “Furthermore, five years after announcing our liability shift, there are still issues with a sufficient supply of regulatory-compliant EMV hardware and software to enable most upgrades by 2017.”

Visa said it has been engaging with participants throughout the payment system and analyzing the issues unique to the fuel segment. An important element of Visa’s research has been that fraud rates at fuel pumps are relatively low — approximately 1.3 percent of total U.S. payment fraud. A number of readily available fraud prevention tools, such as Visa Transaction Advisor, have been particularly successful in driving fraud lower at fuel dispensers. As a result of all of that, Visa decided to delay the date. Visa went on to say that there has been a lot of progress with the EMV migration in the U.S. to date with more than 1.7 million merchants, representing more than one-third of storefronts, now accepting the EMV chips. What’s more, Visa said 388 million Visa chip cards have been issued in the U.S., and it’s seeing a 43 percent reduction of counterfeit fraud at chip-enabled merchants.