An Update on All Things EMV

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The EMV liability shift in the US has been anything but smooth. As of October 1, 2015, merchants now bear the responsibility of covering chargebacks from fraudulent card-present EMV transactions that are processed with a non-EMV compatible point-of-sale solution. Despite this, the industry has yet to expedite the hardware certification required to protect merchants from this fraud. In fact, according to a report by the National Retail Federation and Forrester Research, more than half of mid-size and large retailers have installed new EMV equipment but are still waiting for the certification needed to begin using it. And, many—including Costco, McDonald’s and Safeway—have been waiting six months or more. It has gotten so bad that U.S. Senator Richard Durbin and others are calling for government intervention.

So, what does that mean for Blackbaud’s ability to deliver an EMV-compliant point-of-sale or mobile processing solution? Like the major retailers, we too are directly impacted by these certification delays. Our product team has spent the last year evaluating hardware providers. None have received the certification needed for us to move forward nor have they finalized their Software Development Kits (SDKs), which we need in order to begin work. 

While we aggressively research alternatives, Blackbaud remains committed to delivering an EMV solution that meets your needs, both in terms of features and cost. Until that solution is available, we continue to extend liability coverage to Blackbaud Merchant Services™ clients using Altru®, the Blackbaud Merchant Services Virtual Terminal, and Blackbaud MobilePay™. This coverage includes the cost of chargebacks that occur for card-present, machine-read transactions where a chip-enabled card was swiped using a magnetic stripe reader. Blackbaud is also offering limited liability coverage to U.S. clients processing payments with CyberSource in Altru. Read our FAQ for more details.

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3 Comments
Is there an update on when we can purchase EMV readers for Altru?
Any updates on this?
any further update?

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