EMV standard

On October 15, 2015 the so-called EMV-induced liability shift is going to take place in the USA. In essence, this means that if some merchant does not support EMV standard and has no EMV terminals, this merchant will be automatically held liable for all the fraud occurring during card swipes at its points of sale. An obvious solution for such a merchant is to install EMV terminals before the deadline. However, a business, which already has some solution based on credit card swipers in place, might be reluctant to make an upfront investment into EMV terminals. Instead, such a business can choose to implement point-to-point encryption as the major security mechanism, and invest in liability insurance. Of course, such an option is only relevant for businesses, where fraud risk is relatively low.

More information on how EMV standard and P2PE work together, and on whether they can replace each other, can be found in the respective article on Paylosophy.