NEW YORK -- A controversial subject that gasoline retailers have been struggling with for months gained national attention recently when CNBC shined a spotlight on the huge expense of updating the industry’s gasoline dispensers to accept EMV chips.
The CNBC report said that as U.S. retailers continue the nationwide rollout of payment terminals that accept EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) cards, which are chip-enabled debit and credit cards designed to better prevent fraud, “hackers are dialing up the heat on gas stations, but business owners are about to start fighting back.”
Because many hackers have been thwarted by other retailers, they have increasingly targeted convenience stores and ATMs lacking the security measures, experts told the news outlet.
“From a criminal perspective, that window of opportunity is shrinking,” said Jared Drieling, business intelligence manager for payment data analysis firm The Strawhecker Group. “There’s going to be a rush to get those updated.”
The deadline for installing payment technology is Oct. 1, 2017. It’s going to cost stations and convenience stores about $6 billion, since upgrading the technology comes with a price tag as high as $17,000 per pump, Gray Taylor, executive director of industry group Conexxus, told CNBC. That has the potential to cut into the bottom line of small-business owners, who own most U.S. convenience stores.
Some U.S. retailers, notably small businesses, balked at the fall 2015 deadline to implement EMV technology at points of sale, because the payment terminals were costly to acquire. They run several thousand dollars, depending on the number of card processing machines.
Convenience stories will have to remove many pumps entirely to install new technology. Retrofitting existing pumps can cost more than $6,000, Taylor said.
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