The prospect of American consumers becoming regular users of EMV smart cards in the not-too-distant future means financial institutions and ATM manufacturers should already be addressing the extensive work needed to ensure the migration goes smoothly for consumers, ATM company executives say.
U.S. point-of-sale terminal manufacturers and merchants were pushed to action when Visa Inc. recently announced incentives for accepting EMV chip cards, which consumers already commonly use in Europe and Canada for increased security against fraud (
But U.S. cardholders also will need to be able to use their smart cards at ATMs across the country, sparking a need for banks and machine manufacturers to work together to make that possible, Malon Updike, director of deployment in the Americas at Duluth, Ga.-based NCR Corp., tells PaymentsSource
“Depending on the size of the bank involved, financial executives will have to determine if they want to convert their ATM machines for use with only their signature bank cards on their ATM machines or set up a new set of certification codes to be able to accept all other cards at the ATM,” Updike says.
No matter how banks and ATM companies decide to address the conversion, they should be starting the process now, according to Ian Kerr, CEO of Level Four Americas LLC, a Charlotte, N.C.-based ATM software and testing provider.
Far more transaction permutations occur with EMV cards compared with magnetic stripe cards, requiring the ATM application and host system to process a much wider range of scenarios, Kerr wrote in a blog recently. For example, the chip is a computer device that interacts with the ATM and processes data, whereas magnetic stripes have a static interface.
In the United Kingdom, this triggered a major hardware-replacement cycle because existing legacy IBM OS/2 machines were not capable of supporting the additional cryptographic processing required under EMV, Kerr wrote.
Chuck Somers, vice president of ATM Security at North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold, Inc., believes the ATM transition to accepting EMV cards and the accompanying tests will vary for each financial institution.
“A variety of things can be done in testing, and the bank will determine what kind of test. But they are mostly to ascertain validation of the consumer information,” Somers tells PaymentsSource. “Tests dealing with security purposes are not incredibly intense.”
Without a federal mandate to covert to EMV, it might take longer for U.S. banks than their European counterparts did to embrace the change to EMV because of the sheer number of ATM and point-of-sale networks, Somers says.
Scott Strumello, an associate with Auriemma Consulting Group, agrees the conversion to EMV will not occur quickly.
“This will be a stage-by-stage introduction, and I don’t think EMV acceptance in the U.S. will be so much about fraud detection but more about the rest of the world moving in that direction,” he tells PaymentsSource.
With Visa “sort of mandating it,” the banks and ATM manufacturers know they will have to comply eventually because consumers will want to use their Visa EMV cards in their machines, Strumello says.
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