U.S. banks are steadily shipping more secure chip-embedded credit and debit cards to consumers, but industry attention is also focused on whether merchants have installed updated payment terminals to accept the new cards.

Big retailers like WalMart have spent the last year installing expensive in-store payment terminals that will accept the cards. In many cases, the terminals will also work with NFC-ready smartphones like the latest iPhones equipped with Apple Pay.

Yet only about half of the 12 million payment terminals nationwide are expected to be converted to support chip cards or be NFC-ready smartphones by year’s end. Small and medium-sized businesses are expected to come on board eventually, but have delayed doing the updates because they prefer cheaper alternatives to spending thousands of dollars for each newly installed payment terminal.

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