Safeway has started the full roll-out of Chip and PIN point-of-sales to its 9,000 PoS terminals across the country. The grocer claims it is the first large-scale roll-out in the UK.
The supermarket will begin rolling out in the so-called golden window of the autumn months, after the summer holidays and before Christmas.
Safeway's staff will be trained to use Chip and PIN-enabled tills by the time the roll-out is completed, but they will need practical experience for the knowledge to stick. Safeway business systems manager Jeremy Wyman believes that enough customers will be regularly using PIN-enabled cards for them to get the experience early enough.
He said: 'The break point will be when about 5 per cent of customers are using PIN cards. We've calculated that this is the number needed to have each checkout doing a couple of transactions a day. This is about enough to give the staff the practical experience of the process they need.'
Wyman is confident that the banks will hit the same timeframe with distributing PIN- enabled cards, but thinks they could do more about raising account holders' awareness.
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