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Visa Inc. says will require that all Visa-branded cards in Australia to chip-and-PIN technology over the next four years. Visa has set a chip-and-PIN deadline of 1 April 2013, the card network said in a statement. By then, 100% of Visa cards in Australia must have chips. Chris Clark, Visa general manager for Australia and New Zealand, said in the statement that starting in January, all new Visa credit cards will come with the chip-and-PIN feature, already found throughout much of Asia and Western Europe. Additionally, all Australian merchants that take online, telephone and mail-order transactions must check the three-digit card-verification code from 1 Jan. 2011, the statement added. Matthew Sinclair, executive director of Australia-based Carpadium Consulting, tells CardLine Global Australia actually has relatively low levels of card fraud, which is why Australian banks have been a slow to roll out chip-and-PIN systems. "However, this measure really won't do too much to stop the main fraud point, which is card-not-present fraud," he says. "Chips are great when you have a chip reader at the point of sale, but they don't do too much when you are not at a retail point of sale." About 37% of the 14 million Visa-branded cards in Australia have chips, the card network says.
