What Does EMV Compliance Mean?

EMV compliance is a recommendation rather than a legal obligation. That is to say, EMV compliance does a lot to protect not only universities but their consumers as well. Also, it can prevent them from taking a serious cut of fraud-related losses.

Non-EMV merchants are liable for the fraud on any transactions that are done with a card “swipe” (magnetic stripe) as opposed to a “dip” (EMV-enabled). Merchants could be held liable for fraud if the correct EMV infrastructure isn't installed.

There are associated costs to EMV-compliance, although such costs pale in comparison to potential losses incurred from non-compliance. It can cost anywhere from $500 on the low end to upwards of several thousand dollars for larger businesses to get EMV readers.

Is EMV Compliance Required?

If you take card payments face-to-face, you need to be EMV-enabled.

The United States major card networks have adopted an EMV fraud liability shift for many card-present scenarios as of October 1, 2015.

In simple terms, if a patron has a chip card but the merchant swipes the card with the magnetic stripe at a non-EMV terminal, the transaction is considered counterfeit fraud.

The merchant may get the chargeback because the merchant was the side that hadn't embraced chip acceptance. EMV is purely an anti-counterfeit fraud measure on physical card transactions. It doesn’t mean “customers win every dispute no matter what.”