On October 1, 2015, US commerce will undergo a considerable change—a variety of big credit card companies, financial groups, and issuers will require that merchants upgrade their point-of-sale (POS) terminals to accept chip-based cards as well as (and eventually, instead of) magnetic stripe cards. You may have already received chip-based replacements for your magnetic stripe cards in the mail.

The plan to transition to the new payment standard—called EMV for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa, (the developers of the standard)—was agreed upon in 2012, but a recent Manta survey said that 28 percent of small and medium business owners still aren't aware of the new payment standard. That's particularly troubling, because in the event of magnetic stripe card fraud at a store's POS, the store will be liable for that faulty transaction if they don't have up-to-date hardware that can accept chip cards. (Website-based transactions, commonly considered "card-not-present transactions," are not part of the EMV transition and are treated separately.)

Today, payments processing company Square, founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, said it wants to try to speed that adoption rate up in the next month or two, and hopefully convert some businesses to Square's platform.

To do this, Square has promised to cover any faulty charges that a business incurs if the business has already pre-ordered its latest card reader, set to launch in the fall.

Square already sells a magnetic stripe reader as well as a combination mag stripe and EMV chip card reader, both of which attach to an iOS device to create a user-friendly terminal, but Square's newest device will read EMV chip cards and also accept contactless payments from NFC-enabled devices (think phones enabled with Apple Pay and eventually Android Pay and Samsung Pay). Square is hoping that its liability offer will tempt businesses to integrate its devices, even if the latest device won't be out until fall, after the October 1 liability shift deadline.

Of course, if any fraud occurs with an EMV card at an EMV-compliant terminal, the liability for those charges goes back to the card issuer as normal.

Correction: Ars originally stated that a business could continue using its non-EMV-compliant card readers and be covered for fraudulent charges by Square if they've purchased just one contactless and chip card reader from the company. This is not the case. The business would have to update all of its terminals with contactless and chip card readers, so the offer only covers businesses until those new Square readers arrive in the fall.