Credit unions across the country are working hard to migrate their credit and debit cards to EMV in time for the October 2015 liability shift, but that deadline isn't the only one they have to worry about. Next up is the mass EMV migration for ATMs – and MasterCard's October 2016 liability shift means credit unions are gearing up for another set of hurdles.

Currently, card issuers generally bear the cost of fraud associated with counterfeit cards at ATMs. But after the ATM liability shift, the party that does not support EMV bears the loss. For credit unions that own their ATMs, that means possibly paying for fraud if their ATMs can only read magnetic stripes, even if a member uses a first-generation EMV card that has a chip and a magnetic stripe.

Though Visa's liability shift isn't until a year later, MasterCard's 2016 deadline – coupled with increased recent attention on ATM skimming – is fueling the migration fire. But like card migration, migrating ATMs to EMV is not legally required; rather, it's a way to unload some fraud burden. Nonetheless, credit unions as a whole haven't done much so far, according to a few industry experts.