The Project Management Organisation (PMO) for Chip and PIN has finally launched the national roll-out of EPoS upgrades to comply with the Europay, Mastercard, Visa (EMV) standard.
The move follows the completion of a town-wide trial of the technology in Northampton this summer.
The roll-out will be carried out simultaneously across the country, and not by retail sector, such as grocery or fashion, as was previously intimated to Retail Week by the PMO.
The organisation expects half of all cardholders in the UK to be making one in three transactions by putting in a PIN number, rather than providing a signature for verification, by the spring. That would add up to more than 20 million cardholders using the new method of payment.
The Association for Payment Clearing Services (APACS) confirmed that the first tranches of PIN-enabled cards should be hitting customers' doormats next week.
The PMO marked the occasion by releasing figures from a recent survey of 1,300 adults across the country, which suggested that 84 per cent were keen to adopt PIN payment processes. Some 95 per cent believed they would have no trouble using the cards.
However, much still needs to be done before all of the 850,000 shop terminals in the UK are upgraded.
Despite the PMO's optimism, there is still a proportion of tier-two retailers that have not yet begun the accreditation process, leaving them vulnerable to fraudsters after the January 2005 deadline.
British Retail Consortium director of retail services Amanda Miller confirmed that there were still some retailers that had not yet got on board.
'There are still some areas of concern,' she said. 'But we should start to see a move towards meeting the liability shift date.'
Many retailers have warned that there may be a bottleneck at the accreditation stage if too many retailers leave it until the last minute. Sandra Quinn, heading up the programme for APACS, confirmed it could be a worry.
'It's one of the things we picked up from the trial,' she said. 'That's why the time is now for retailers to start looking at this.'
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