Fifteen per cent of UK shops and businesses have still not upgraded systems to accept chip-and-PIN credit and debit cards, according to figures from banking industry body Apacs.

Chip-and-PIN is more secure than traditional signature authorisation, and from 14 February sales outlets with suitable systems will no longer be able to accept signatures if customers do not know their PIN.

But, according to Apacs, 90,000 of the UK’s 860,000 card terminals are not yet compatible.

Most large outlets have completed the necessary changes.

Grocery chain Waitrose has had problems upgrading its systems (Computing, 12 January), but the company says it is confident that it will meet the 14 February deadline, despite only a quarter of its checkouts having been successfully chip-and-PIN-enabled so far.

Very small businesses with leased processing systems have been automatically upgraded by the banks.

But several medium-sized retailers have made a commercial decision not to rush to meet the banking industry’s deadlines.

Card and gift retailer Clinton Cards is considering chip-and-PIN only as part of wider plans to meet an April deadline for all credit card terminals to be linked to the banking network for automatic online authorisation – regardless of whether they have been upgraded to chip-and-PIN.

‘Chip-and-PIN will more than likely be part of that because the units come with that functionality anyway,’ Clinton Cards IT support technician Robert Brown told Computing.

DIY giant B&Q is also working to an April schedule.

‘We are having to upgrade our entire electronic point of sale system in all our stores, as our old system was not compatible with chip-and-PIN,’ said a B &Q spokeswoman.

And department store chain Bhs will not complete its upgrade until August.

A British Retail Consortium spokeswoman said: ‘Realistically it is never going to be 100 per cent – these decisions are made on risk assessments and it is going to be a commercial decision.’

Firms with smaller transaction sizes face a lower risk of fraud, so are less likely to invest in the new systems, says Kieran Hines, analyst at Datamonitor.

‘The perception with the remaining smaller retailers is that they don’t see enough of a business case to migrate their systems, where the cost of migration outweighs their fraud liability,’ he said.

From 1 January last year, financial responsibility for the cost of fraud on non-PIN transactions passed from banks to retailers.