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Visa puts its weight behind EMV in the U.S.

August 17, 2011 by Ian Kerr — CEO, Level Four

Last week, Visa announced that it is kicking off three new initiatives to accelerate the adoption of EMV and NFC technology in the U.S. Visa is the largest card scheme in the U.S., putting it in a strong position to finally bring about EMV migration in one of the last Western countries to still be relying on mag-stripe cards.

This is welcome news to security-conscious U.S. consumers and also to the payment card industry as a whole. On this forum I have long blogged about the benefits of EMV. Recent discussions have pointed to a "when" rather than "if" attitude to EMV migration in the U.S., and it appears we are closer now to the tipping point when the initiative will start.

Interestingly, however, Visa has chosen to focus on the NFC mobile payment capability that a migration to chip cards will enable. While the rest of the world migrated to EMV in a move that is largely driven by security, Visa’s new announcement indicates that the rise in mobile payments is the catalyst that has finally driven it to get behind the initiative in the U.S.

Regardless of its motivations, there is still a great deal of work to be done to ensure that all payment channels are ready to support EMV. We created a best practice guide to EMV migration, following our support of many global projects to prepare the ATM channel for EMV. Our strongest advice is that with any change, there is a need to fully test the new environment end to end.

There are significantly more types of card conditions and transaction permutations with EMV cards, rather than with magnetic stripe cards, which require the ATM application and host system to process a much wider range of scenarios.

As a result, EMV compliant ATMs are about 10 times more labor intensive to test than traditional ATMs. To ensure that the ATM continues to deliver a high level of customer service and satisfaction during this time of EMV migration in the U.S., financial institutions must consider their ATM testing strategies.

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