ANKENY, Iowa – Like all gasoline retailers, Casey’s General Stores Inc. is evaluating its rollout of Europay MasterCard and Visa (EMV)-enabled fuel dispensers across its entire network of more than 1,900 convenience stores.
In October 2015, the liability for fraudulent transactions from inside the store shifted from MasterCard and Visa to the retail location. Processing a chip card inside the store without upgraded equipment could make the retailer liable for any fraudulent chip-card transactions.
The same liability shift takes place outside at the fuel dispensers Oct. 1, 2017. By that date, gasoline retailers will need to retrofit or replace pumps to accept EMV or else shoulder the burden of any fraudulent charges related to a chip card.
- Click here for an EMV timeline.
It’s going to cost stations and convenience stores about $6 billion, because upgrading the technology comes with a price tag as high as $17,000 per pump, Gray Taylor, executive director of c-store industry technology group Conexxus, recently told CNBC.
So how will Casey’s, one of the largest c-store chains in the country that sells gasoline, respond?
“The EMV [standard] goes into effect October of next year,” said CFO Bill Walljasper on the company’s most recent earning call. “It’s not a mandate, as we all know, it’s just that’s the liability shift comes into play. So right now, we’re evaluating the best rollout of EMV, and it really will come down to the competitive landscape of our marketplace.”
He said Casey’s is in “wait-and-see mode” on how its competitors will implement the standard: “Will they implement EMV technology at the pump or will they just assume the liability of credit-card fraud?”
But he did offer an answer for how Casey’s itself will handle it.
“I can tell you that we do not plan to roll out EMV to all of our stores. It just necessarily doesn’t make a lot of sense in the small communities where we don’t have a lot of potential credit card fraud, or historically haven’t had that type of activity,” he said. “And it is an expensive endeavor. There is roughly $30,000 to $40,000 per store dependent on a number of pumps. So we’ll be very calculative in how we roll that out. More than likely, if we do roll it out, to a large degree it will be at stores that are in states [with] larger metropolitan areas where we might be more susceptible to that type of activity.”
Casey's, based in Ankeny, Iowa, operates approximately 1,930 convenience stores in 14 states in the Midwest.
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