What You Need to Know About Chip Cards

Their rollout has been slow, spotty and sometimes frustrating.

- Lisa Gerstner

1. Deadline? What deadline? 

New rules went into effect last October that make merchants liable for fraudulent transactions if they haven’t updated their terminals to accept chip-card, or EMV, payments. But as of late January, merchants had activated chip-card readers at only 17% of in-store locations, according to Visa; only 50% of locations were expected to have functioning readers by the end of 2016. Card issuers are doing a little better. There are more than 400 million chip cards now in circulation, says Randy Vanderhoof, director of the EMV Migration Forum—but that’s still only one-third of the estimated 1.2 billion total cards on the market.

2. They’ve got your number.