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Survey: Few are ready for ATM liability shift

April 29, 2013

Results of a survey conducted by the ATM Industry Association were released today — and they confirmed the widespread belief within the industry that the ATM liability shift enacted a week ago on MasterCard Maestro ATM transactions was premature. 

An overwhelming majority (88 percent) of respondents said they would not be able to deploy a single EMV-capable ATM by the April 19, 2013 liability shift date. Only 9 percent of respondents said they even had access to solutions that would be required for the processing of EMV transactions.

According to a news release from ATMIA, the Maestro shift — which affects ATM operators only — will represent a serious problem for the industry, precipitating "unpredictable results and unintended consequences," said a statement from the organization. "MasterCard is forcing one-off solutions upon individual operators [who] will have to be recertified once the industry has resolved the challenges associated with Durbin requirements and other debit system prerequisites."

ATMIA said that MasterCard had declined all requests to postpone the liability shift and align it to those for retail POS or Visa ATM milestones.

Just days prior to the liability shift deadline, on April 11, MasterCard announced a new set of acquirer-based fraud detection tools, that the company said would help protect the industry from fraud. This included a program called Fraud Rules Manager that blocks all Maestro transactions at ATMs with little or no past history of Maestro traffic.

"All they are really doing is assuring that any Maestro fraud that occurs, occurs at terminals that already see an average of at least one Maestro transaction per month," said ATMIA USA Executive Director, David Tente. "Partial solutions like this are rarely effective in actually reducing the overall rate of fraud."

Read more about EMV.

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ATM Industry Association (ATMIA)

The ATM Industry Association, founded in 1997, is a global non-profit trade association with over 10,500 members in 65 countries. The membership base covers the full range of this worldwide industry comprising over 2.2 million installed ATMs.

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