Discover Financial’s processing arm, Discover Network, Tuesday announced the time frames for merchants and acquirers in North America to comply with the EMV chip card standard or lose protections from counterfeit card fraud. The date for point-of-sale terminals and automated fuel pumps mirror dates mandated by other card networks: October 2015 and October 2017, repectively.
The announcement also includes details about a program that mimic’s Visa’s Technology Innovation Program and waives merchants’ annual PCI audit requirement when 75% of point-of-sale transactions are EMV compliant. Discover’s PIN debit network, PULSE, has a somewhat more aggressive timeline.
From Discover’s press release:
PULSE, a Discover Financial Services company and one of the nation’s leading debit/ATM networks, will capitalize on Discover’s already significant EMV-deployment experience by using the D-Payment Application Specification (D-PAS) to enable EMV transactions at the point of sale. In addition to introducing Fraud Liability Shift, PULSE will require U.S. direct-connect merchants and point of sale acquirer processors to support EMV data effective Oct. 16, 2013.
Although PULSE’s implementation of D-PAS supports all cardholder verification methods, its U.S. implementation of EMV is expected to feature broad support for online PIN-authenticated transactions as the most secure cardholder verification method.
Click here to read more from the press release.