Gas stations caught a lucky break a year ago when Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. postponed their planned October 2017 EMV liability shifts for unattended fuel pumps for three years. Almost no convenience store or stand-alone gas station chain would have been ready by then, retail petroleum executives say, and going into 2018 the pump conversion is still moving slowly.
When asked this week what percentage of U.S. automated fuel dispensers are ready to accept chip cards, one industry expert who requested anonymity pegged the number as “very low.” That’s not surprising considering that only six months earlier Gilbarco Vedder-Root, a big fuel-pump manufacturer, announced what it claimed to be the first EMV transaction coming from a U.S. pump. That leaves somewhere north of 1 million more dispensers to go.