Visa Inc. will no longer require merchants outside the United States to validate annually their compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard — provided that 75% of their transactions come from EMV chip-and-PIN cards.
EMV terminals provide added layers of authentication and fraud protection, Visa said. Visa Europe is backing a similar program, the San Francisco company said in a press release Wednesday. It asserted that the Federal Reserve Board's proposed debit-interchange fee caps led it to exclude U.S. merchants from this program.
"It is not feasible or appropriate to drive the market toward major infrastructure investments, especially in an environment where financial institutions could lose billions in revenue as a result of the regulations," Bill Sheedy, Visa group executive for the Americas, said in a press release Wednesday.
