Is EMV An Open Invitation To Fraudulent Chargebacks?

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

I was talking with a value added reseller (VAR) of restaurant POS and payment systems last week. He’s on the front lines of EMV. His company is exemplary of the ground-level VARs that banks and payment solutions providers are relying on to saturate the small and mid-sized retail and restaurant markets with EMV technology. Those big banks and payments companies are spending gobs of time and money to push, pull, and prod thousands of VARs and independent software vendors like him—those who serve the small and mid markets—to move the technology downstream. 

But this guy told me he couldn’t care less whether or not his customers adopt EMV.

He didn’t always feel this way. Up until about a month ago, he was a proponent of the EMV standard. He felt it was his duty as a technology reseller to help his customers protect themselves and their guests. It was working. He was actively selling EMV terminals, touting the EMV compliant attributes of the POS software he resells. It wasn’t necessarily padding his pocketbook. He told me the value of pushing EMV to small and midsized merchants wasn’t in the monetization of the terminals a much as it was in the opportunity to present his company as a trusted security expert and win more business on the fear and uncertainty that permeates the merchant’s understanding of payment security.