 This blog was published in Finextra. After recent high profile data breaches in retailers such as Target, some have resorted to EMV at the POS for security. This blog analyzes the pros and cons in the alternatives for payment security in USA:
0 Comments
 EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) is a payment industry standard that is widely popular and adopted across Europe. Card networks have been circulating benefits, rules, and policies related to EMV introduction within North America for a while. EMV promises reliability (as it is used widely across Europe) as well as enhanced security options that minimize fraud compared to current payment mechanisms. As EMV cards use smartcard chips (small electronic circuits that are embedded within plastic cards), they offer higher security in the form of stored PIN and other options such as contactless payments. They also have the ability to work with legacy POS terminals where the smartcard chip may not work.
In the case of Europe, EMV was adopted long back and so the question of choice between EMV and mWallets did not even arise. However, USA, being a laggard in the adoption of EMV, it is perfectly legitimate to ask “EMV or mWallets?” for USA. In fact, mWallets are stored in smartphones that have much more processing power than the small chips in smartcards. So it is quite possible to implement comparable security mechanisms in mWallets as well. Resolving this choice carefully might accelerate POS migration and transformation by retailers as they may be able to avoid multiple migration steps and investments. |
AuthorI am a Management Consultant in Banking and Financial Services. Check out my "home" and "about" pages for more details. Archives
April 2019
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
