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U.S. Payments Forum ATM Fallback Questionnaire

This survey seeks feedback from payments stakeholders on their experiences and insights around fallback at the ATM. ATM fallback occurs when a chip card is used at a chip terminal, but the transaction does not result in a full EMV transaction and is completed as a magnetic stripe-read transaction. This can happen if the chip is not read or if there is an issue with the card reader at the ATM. Magstripe-only cards are not to be considered fallback.


Issuer Questions
1. What is the fallback rate of your cards at the ATM? (Or other merchants)
2. How does that rate compare to a previous time period, e.g. previous year?
3. Are there any cards with 100% fallback that might need to be replaced?
4. Are there any acquirers that consistently have very high fallback rates at their ATMs?
5. What are the fraud/chargeback rates for Fallback vs. Chip?
6. Do you have fraud rules regarding ATM fallback? What is the potential impact?
Acquiring Questions
7. What is the fallback rate for your ATM fleet overall?
7a. How does the rate change over given time periods? (Day,Week,Month,Year)
7b. Does the rate consistently get worse? Is it at 100% Fallback, or does it fluctuate?
8. What is the fallback rate for individual ATMs?
8a. What is the fallback rate where you should take a closer look at the ATM? (for example, 10% fallback rate for a week). Target rates can vary depending on volume at ATM; low volume tend to fluctuate, and one bad card used multiple times can throw off the numbers.
8b. When looking closer: are just a few cards causing the bad rate? Are all or most transactions falling back consecutively?
8c. If the issue seems to go away, when are you going to look at that ATM again to make sure the issue is not recurring?
9. Do you have real time alerts when any contact chip portion of the card reader fails or do you rely on fallback data to tell you the card reader is possibly failing?
10. Across the fleet, what BINs have the highest fallback (with high volume)? These could be affecting the rate.
11. If you are an issuer too, what are the fallback rates of your cards at your ATMs? How does that compare to other BINs investigated above?
Relative to the types of fallback you as an ATM owner/processor are experiencing:

Is it predominantly technical fallback or true fallback (no chip present)?
Are you seeing an empty candidate list on the chip creating a fallback situation? If so, how often?