FRAMINGHAM, Mass. – Switching U.S. payment technology to the Europay MasterCard Visa (EMV) smartcard system might take more time than anticipated and provide less security than currently proposed, Computerworld reports. Following the recent spat of massive data violations at Neiman Marcus, Michaels and Target, many experts and lawmakers have touted the EMV standards as a solution to such security breaches.

The publication lists five issues that could hamper the switch to EMV smartcard standards in the United States. First, changing to EMV would run into the billions of dollars. EMV card readers are priced at hundreds of dollars each. Gray Taylor, executive director of PCATS, said the convenience store and petroleum retail industry would shell out close to $4 billion to change around 800,000 POS systems to accept EMV cards. Across the country, retailers would be upgrading or exchanging roughly 13 million POS systems. “That is a big expense that we are going to have to pass down to the consumer,” said Taylor.

Second, the security return-on-investment isn’t clear. In other words, if retailers invest in EMV technology, their systems still might not be secure enough to prevent massive data breaches. That’s because EMV can be implemented in less secure ways, such as not requiring a PIN, which hasn’t been a mandatory requirement.

“It is not the enhanced security system that retailers have long-called for,” said Brain Dodge, senior vice president of communications at the Retail Industry Leaders Association. “There is an enormous cost with moving systems to EMV. From the retailers' perspective, the added protection we are getting (from smartcards) is not enough to justify the expense” unless PINs are mandatory.

Third, it’s not just an issue of requiring a PIN. U.S plans for implementing EMV technology would allow magnetic stripes on the card’s back, which weakens the security of a smartcard.

Fourth, time is not on our side. While MasterCard and Visa have set October 2015 as the deadline for moving to EMV payments, it will take much longer to make the wholesale switch. Canada started the change to EMV a decade ago, and still has only around 85% of its POS systems able to accept EMV cards. Banks, too, have been dragging their feet in issuing EMV smartcards. “Visa and MasterCard are hell bent on making us homogenous with the rest of the world. But the fact is that we're going to be the last guys in on an aging technology,” said Taylor.

Fifth, legal obstacles to EMV smartcards center around the Durbin Amendment, which gave merchants a choice between at least two independent networks for debit card transaction processing. That issue still hasn’t been decided in court, and won’t be until this fall, so retailers can’t move ahead on EMV smartcards for signature debit card and PIN transactions.