Canadian payment cards will all include security chips by 2015.
Major participants in the Canadian payment card industry — the debit network Interac Association, MasterCard Canada Inc., and Visa Canada Association — said Tuesday that a trial of smart card technology was a success, and announced plans to shift the country's entire card system to the Europay, MasterCard, Visa security format.
The trial began last fall in the Kitchener-Waterloo area outside Ontario, and eventually involved about 65 merchants and nearly 25 banks, card companies, and processors, said Tracey Black, the program director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Industry Chip Trial.
The trial achieved "critical mass" in March, Ms. Black said in an interview Tuesday. She said there were enough cards and readers in place to begin drawing conclusions. Fraud prevention was the major driving factor in the migration to chip cards, Ms. Black said.
Caroline Hubberstey, Interac's director of communications and government relations, said other countries have experienced fraud reductions of as much as 80% after shifting to EMV cards. "The system we have is safe. This is just making it safer," she said.
In a July telephone survey of 402 consumers in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, 88% said the chip cards were as easy to use as magnetic stripe cards. In a September phone survey, 75% of front-line employees at Kitchener-Waterloo merchants said that processing chip card transactions was as easy as processing magnetic stripe transactions, or easier.
The individual card brands plan to pursue their own strategies to bring the chip technology to market, Ms. Black said. Shifting to EMV requires issuers to provide the cards and merchants to install readers that can accept them.
Interac said its members will begin to distribute chip debit cards to customers across Canada starting this fall, as banks and processors begin to replace magnetic stripe readers at retail terminals and automated teller machines with chip-enabled devices.
Interac said the majority of ATMs and debit cards will be EMV-compliant by the end of 2010. Magnetic stripe cards will no longer be accepted at ATMs after 2012, and at store terminals after 2015.
EMV cards are widely used in Europe and Asia, but not in the United States.
