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Though the grounds for adoption may be there, payments industry players are unsure when U.S. card issuers might embrace chip-and-PIN technology. Chip-and-PIN follows the EMV antifraud standard requiring a chip in the card and cardholders to enter a personal identification number to secure transactions. "If you ask me when chip-and-PIN is going to come to the U.S., I'm going to dodge that question," Timothy H. Murphy, group executive of core products at MasterCard Worldwide, said last week in response to an audience question after his speech at the ATM, Debit & Prepaid Forum hosted by SourceMedia in Las Vegas. "There is no clear answer on chip-and-PIN in the U.S." Meanwhile, Robert Carr, CEO of merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems Inc., gave a more candid answer during his speech at the forum. "I don't think I'm going to be around when that happens," he said. However, some observers say EMV cards for the U.S. are just around the corner, mainly because both Canada and Mexico are adopting them. Canadian payments players must switch to chip-and-PIN by October 2010. "I do think [EMV in the U.S.] will happen," says Nick Holland, senior analyst at Aite Group, a Boston-based research firm. EMV cards will come in a trickle, not a flow, he says, citing the terminal expense and the cost for cards, each of which can cost $1 or so more than a magnetic stripe card. "Once Canada goes to EMV, that's going to be very game changing for the U.S." because of the risk of fraud moving south across the border, he says. Meanwhile, issuers in Mexico continue to distribute EMV cards as merchant acquirers work toward the deployment of at least 500,000 EMV-enabled point-of-sale terminals, Mercator analyst Terry Xie wrote in an April report.
