What is EMV?
Consumers today know EMV as “chip cards” – the latest in payment cards, which now come with embedded computer chips, increasing protection against credit and debit card fraud. These smart chips replace the magnetic stripe as a way to store important data.
Magnetic strips essentially fall short because they’re static – they never change. Meanwhile, chip cards a unique transaction code for each payment.
As president of U.S. payment systems for Creditcall, Dave Witts said in an article for CreditCards.com, “If someone copies a mag stripe, they can easily replicate that data over and over again because it doesn’t change.”
The technical name for the chip card is EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa), and it’s the latest standard for security in credit and debit card transactions, already implemented in more than 80 countries. 99.9% of payment terminals in Western Europe, 87.7% the terminals of Canada and 71.4% of terminals in the Asia Pacific region are EMV ready terminals.
EMV is effective in driving down credit card fraud, with France claiming an 80% reduction in credit card fraud and chip-enabled merchants in general seeing a 35% drop in counterfeit fraud compared to the previous year.
When is EMV coming to the United States?
The United States, where only 0.03% of terminals are EMV terminals, is moving toward EMV compliance. In fact, by the end of 2015, 271 million EMV cards were already in circulation in the United States. Most debit and credit cards in the United States should be reissued with EMV chips by October of 2016.
What does this mean for ATM owners?
Beginning October 1, 2016, ATM owners may be liable for fraudulent transactions if they process EMV cards using magnetic stripes instead of EMV technology.
While EMV adoption is voluntary, as of this October, the liability for credit card fraud will now fall on those who use lesser technology to the detriment of their customers’ security. In 2016, that liability in the United States totals more than $10 billion.
You can easily prevent this liability by installing an EMV-enabled terminal.