Europay/MasterCard/Visa (EMV) Smartcard Payment System

By David Bowlin, Marketing Consultant, TSYS Acquiring Solutions
Peter Michaud, Marketing Intelligence, TSYS Acquiring Solutions

Replacing the almost 40 year old magnetic stripe card transaction processing method is the EMV smartcard payment system, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa. EMV is a global standard for interoperation of IC (Integrated Circuit also known as "chip cards") and IC card-capable point of sale (POS) terminals and Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) for authenticating credit and debit card transactions. The goal of this standard is improvement in security that will ultimately benefit all — including the merchant, banks and consumer — with decreased fraud and overall costs to all parties.

To solve security flaws, the associations are leading other industry players to replace traditional magnetic stripe equipment with smartcard technology. Smartcard technology credit and debit cards contain an embedded microchip and are authenticated automatically using a personal identification number (PIN). Although this adds a few additional steps to the process, the impact on the payments industry’s infrastructure is significant.