Written by I was pleased to see in the news recently that Chase and Wells Fargo announced the issuance of EMV chip-enabled cards for several of their credit card portfolios.
[From Portals and Rails]
I notice that at many of the US international airports I’ve been to recently (on a sample of three) you can buy prepaid Sterling and Euro pre-paid chip and PIN cards from the Travelex booths as well. Chase and Wells aren’t the first US EMV issuers.
State Employees’ Credit Union (Secu) is set to be one of the first financial institutions in the US to roll out chip and PIN debit cards to its customers. The non-profit cooperative has enlisted French vendor Oberthur Technologies to help migrate its 1.6 million debit card holders to EMV between March and the end of the year.
[From Finextra: State Employees’ Credit Union makes EMV move]
The pressure for US migration is growing. As Jamie Henry of Walmart mentioned in his recent Tomorrow’s Transactions podcast, many retailers are asking the banks to go ahead with migration because they think it will reduce their costs dealing with fraud and PCI-DSS. Perhaps the pressure is reaching a critical point of some kind.
Don Rhodes, senior director of risk management policy for the American Bankers Association, says a number of emerging technologies, such as the EMV chip standard, mobile payments and peer-to-peer or person-to-person payments, will soon change the way U.S. financial institutions and merchants connect and transact. And it could all happen in 2011, much sooner than most industry experts expect.
[From EMV, Mobile and the Payments Landscape]
The kind of things that have been going on with Google and Square and Isis would serve, I think, to reinforce that the trend is accelerating. The fact that some of the trailblazers (eg, Bling Nation) have found it heavy going doesn’t mean anything about the overall trend (the weather isn’t the climate, as they say). I saw in a Mercator Advisory Group press release that they are saying that
Merchants are advised to “spend the $10” for EMV capable terminals now in anticipation of an eventual EMV roll-out.
[From EMV in the USA: Waiting on Debit, a Mandate, or Just the Opportune Moment]
They were anticipating an early 2011 start for the EMV roll-out, which is exactly what appears to have happened, albeit still on a limited scale. Elsewhere, the chip and PIN bandwagon rolls on inexorably.
Due to an increasing number of transaction fraud worldwide, more and more countries are shifting from the stripe card standard to the EMV standard, which substantially enhances transaction security and operation efficiency. Now some major Chinese commercial banks are to join the trend, planning to issue their chip band cards by the middle of the year.
[From Banks in China to Launch Chip Cards]
Perhaps in the Americas it will take political leadership to enable to the final push towards EMV, a President with real vision and a commitment to the well-being of his nation.
President Chavez has mandated that the country move to EMV chip cards later this year which should stop this type of fraud
[From Chavez figures out how to stop cross border fraud]
Well, if only President Obama shared the wisdom, vision and economic genius of the noted revolutionary leader Hugo Chavez! So Viva El Presidente and down with the reactionary and counter-revolutionary Yankee magnetic stripe hegemony imposed by the running dog lackeys of imperialist aggression.
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