Consumers love credit cards for quick and easy purchases. Merchants? Not so much. One big problem is fraud: Transactions with bogus plastic can drain significant sums from the bottom line.
In a move to address security concerns, the card industry has introduced plastic with embedded chips highly resistant to counterfeiting. Even so, many businesses are delaying the costly investments required to upgrade their point-of-sale (POS) terminals to read the new technology.
“By late 2016, only 44 percent of U.S. merchants of all kinds had installed chip-reading terminals,” says Jared Drieling, Business Intelligence Manager at The Strawhecker Group, an Omaha-based consulting firm specializing in the electronic payments industry. “And only 29 percent of merchants had activated such terminals to actually accept transactions.”