The main transition to EMV Chip Credit Cards started October 2015.
Retailers of all types have been trying to adapt and upgrade their systems for the changes. A number of retailers have made the transition, while others have not really made much progress.
For businesses who have not updated their systems to accepting chip cards, there is the potential increase in financial liability. Retailers can now be held liable for counterfeit transactions that used to be covered by banks.
By installing the new EMV compatible payment terminals, this can help to reduce the Merchant's liability in the event of fraud. With the chip cards, each transaction has a unique code assigned to it, which makes it more difficult to be replicated. While with the previous magnetic stripe cards the data contained is unchanged and can be easily replicated. So if someone were to steal the information, the data could be replicated many times over. With the chip card, if the information is stolen, duplicating the transaction would not work because of having a unique code generated with each transaction.
If you would like to reference the main document for more information, you can click to read document Datacap Guide to US EMV.