EMV mandates a worldwide standard of chip based financial transactions vs. magnetic stripe cards.
EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa; it is a joint effort to ensure security for customers and interoperability which is the ability of two or more systems or components or software to exchange information and to use the information to make better decisions. This will also enable cardholders to use secure EMV payment cards globally.
EMV is becoming the new standard for authenticating credit and debit card transactions.
A layer of security is added with EMV chip equipped cards; according to experts it is fairly easy to reprogram magnetic strip cards with stolen consumer information. The new cards will still be donned with the magnetic strip so that they can be used with non-EMV card readers but the microchip will give the card additional authentication requirements when used with an EMV compliant card reader. Unfortunately, EMV integration will not prevent all fraud. While these extra security measures are taken with in-store purchases, they will not protect consumer financial data from on-line purchases.
Payment cards that comply with the EMV standard are often called Chip and PIN or Chip and Signature cards, depending on the authentication methods employed by the card issuer.
It’s virtually impossible to make a counterfeit EMV card because the chip is extremely difficult to tamper with or clone, which has resulted in reduced counterfeit fraud wherever EMV has been implemented.
ATM EMV Technology & Compliance
Because EMV uses better data security, this standard is being adopted in the United States. In addition, most debit and credit cards will be reissued with EMV chips by October 2016. EMV terminals are already in use all over the world and growing more and more popular everywhere.