SAN FRANCISCO – Visa yesterday announced plans to accelerate the migration to EMV contact and contactless chip technology in the United States.
“The adoption of dual-interface chip technology will help prepare the U.S. payment infrastructure for the arrival of NFC-based mobile payments by building the necessary infrastructure to accept and process chip transactions that support either a signature or PIN at the point of sale,” Visa said.
The chip technology will boost the adoption of mobile payments and also make payments more secure through dynamic authentication, Visa said, adding, “By reducing static authentication, we diminish the value of stolen cardholder data, benefiting all stakeholders.”
Currently, United Nations FCU in New York is the only credit union issuing EMV cards.
Visa said its plan to encourage the U.S. adoption of dynamic chip authentication technology will include three initiatives: expanding its Technology Innovation Program to merchants in the U.S.; building processing infrastructure for chip acceptance by requiring U.S. acquirer processors and sub-processor service providers to be able to support merchant acceptance of chip transactions no later than April 1, 2013; and stabling a counterfeit fraud “liability shift” effective Oct. 1, 2013, so that if a contact chip card is presented to a merchant that has not adopted, at minimum, contact chip terminals, liability for counterfeit fraud may shift to the merchant’s acquirer.
