State Bank of India Ltd. on July 28 became the first card issuer in the country to announce plans to convert its entire portfolio of magnetic stripe credit cards to EMV chip-and-PIN formats.
The Mumbai-based bank will convert at least 85% of the new credit cards its issues within the next week, a spokesperson from the bank tells PaymentsSource.
“We want to achieve 100% migration of all new credit cardholders within the next month,” he says. “Migration of existing cardholders from magnetic stripe to EMV chip standard would be a longer term target.”
The migration plans comply with the Reserve Bank of India’s recommendations in January to convert all debit and credit cards in the country to the EMV chip standard by 2013 to fight ATM and point-of-sale card fraud (
The bank does not plan to migrate its debit cards to the EMV standard in the year 2011, the spokesperson confirmed.
In another recommendation in June, the central bank asked all merchant acquirers and card issuers in India to establish adequate risk-management systems and processes to help prevent card fraud within the next 12 months (
State Bank of India issues more than 2.5 million Visa- and MasterCard-branded credit cards in India, according to data from the bank.
