ETA’s Scott Talbott Testifies before Congress on EMV

October 7, 2015 – ETA announced that today, ETA’s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, Scott Talbott, testified before the full House Small Business Committee in a hearing entitled, “The EMV Deadline and What it Means to Small Business.” A copy of Talbott’s testimony can be found here. To watch the entire hearing, click here. Talbott’s testimony is part of a larger effort by ETA to educate small merchants about the benefits of investing in secure infrastructure.

“Supporting new cards with EMV-chip technology is one of several important steps, including tokenization and end-to-end encryption, that electronic payments companies are taking to prevent data-breach and to protect customers’ private information,” said Scott Talbott, ETA SVP of Government Affairs. “The October 1 liability shift is not a mandate, but rather an important incentive to ensure that criminals are stopped before they have the opportunity to commit credit-card fraud.”

EMV chip cards prevent the single most common form of in-store card fraud in the U.S., counterfeit card fraud, by generating a dynamic security code with each transaction. Banks are replacing the 1.2 billion debit and credit cards in American wallets today with chip-enabled cards, and the nation’s eight million merchants will upgrade their infrastructure to process chip card transactions. Globally, 70 percent of the world’s cards are already using the EMV standard.

Additional witnesses for this hearing include: Stephanie Ericksen, Vice President of Risk Products for Visa Inc., Paul Weston, President & CEO of TCM Bank, N.A. and Jan N. Roche, President and CEO of the State Department Federal Credit Union.

ETA has compiled a variety of resources educating small merchants on payments security, including custom video shorts, free webinars, and the payments security resource sellsafeinfo.org.

For media inquiries, contact Meghan Cieslak at 202-677-7406 or [email protected].

About ETA

The Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) is the global trade association representing more than 500 payments and technology companies. ETA members make commerce possible by processing more than $5 trillion in purchases in the U.S. and deploying payments innovations to merchants and consumers.