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Card companies aim for April, 2013 EMV changeover in Australia

August 6, 2012

Visa and MasterCard have announced that by April of 2013, all of their cards issued by Australian banks will be EMV compliant.

EFTPOS Payments Australia Limited, a company whose payment system processes transactions on bank-issued debit cards, also has said that it will be EMV and contactless compliant in 2013, said an article in TechWorld.

Visa Australia country risk manager Sasha Slevec told attendees at a recent Cyber Security Summit in Sydney that by April 1, 2013, all Visa ATMs will be EMV enabled. "We have some good pilots in the market under way with EMV chip enabled ATMs," he said, according to the TechWorld report.

Slevec said that Visa also would implement an online risk-based authentication system to counter online fraud. When customers attempt to carry out transactions the company considers high-risk  — a set of golf clubs, for instance — Visa will ask users to verify their identity by some special means, such as a one-time-use SMS password sent to their mobile phone.

An article by PC World said that the transition to EMV in Australia has taken several years and that the changeover in Australia has been fraught with missed self-imposed industry deadlines.

PC World speculated that the Australian example might be an indicator of even greater difficulties with EMV adoption in the U.S., which has 6,000 FIs and a population of 300 million, as opposed to Australia's four major banks and population of 22 million. 

For more on this topic, visit the EMV research center.