A few months ago when a new restaurant opened in my small town, a natural sense of curiosity overcame me and so I headed there for dinner with some friends. The ambience was comfortable and the food was fresh. Everything was new, including the point of sale (POS) machine. When I asked the owner if he had considered getting a POS machine with a chip card reader, he said he didn't know anything about it. And, while I work day-in and day-out talking, reading and discussing chip cards and EMV, it still stunned me that a new restaurant owner was unaware of the technology and the liability shift coming to the U.S. in October.

It turns out this small business owner isn't alone, I continued my very unscientific (but tasty) research over the next few weeks by asking restaurant owners and those working the POS machines if they were aware of the liability shift. I found that many Americans remain unaware of the EMV liability shift even though credit card companies, POS machine vendors and others are talking about it quite often.

In an effort to further educate small and medium-sized businesses and consumers about the liability shift, NXP hosted an hour-long Twitter discussion, #EMVChat on September 17. With our partners at Verifone, Visa and The Smart Card Alliance we sought to build a better understanding of what the shift means for everyone through the Twitter chat.

Using the Twitter handles @Verifone, @SmartCardOrgUSA, @VisaSecurity and @nxp_id_business, we discussed how chip technology is an evolution that will help increase security, reduce card-present fraud and enable future value-added applications. Chip-enabled cards are standard bank cards that are embedded with a micro-computer chip. In October, all merchants must be chip card ready if they want to stay protected due to the liability shift. With this chat, our goal was to help educate the community on EMV technology and create an open forum to discuss the future of payments.

Below is a recap of the chat in case you missed it:

When @NXP asked:

The reason EMV is the global standard was highlighted:

We wanted to make sure people knew they could trust this technology, and while it is new to many in the U.S., the technology is not new.

For consumers who use ATMs the transition will take a little longer.

And with there being so much global discussion about mobile wallets, we wanted to make sure small businesses and consumers alike knew how that technology fit into the overall liability shift.

Many more questions were asked and answered during the Twitter chat. Log on to Twitter and search #EMVchat for more details.

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