Visa USA has issued recommendations on how to implement the
shift from magnetic stripe payment cards to
EMV.
Stephanie Ericksen, head of authentication
product integration at Visa USA, explained that the recommendations
were a response to the questions asked within the US card industry
regarding the migration to EMV
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Ericksen emphasised that EMV does not
necessarily mean chip-and-PIN.
“We can rely on online processing where
transactions are transmitted in real-time to the issuer for
approval. With that in place, there’s no need for the offline
authentication that was the genesis of chip-and-PIN,” she said.
EMV aims to offer the card industry in the US
a way of avoiding the cost and complexity involved in deploying
older-generation chip cards, while still reaping all of the
benefits of reduced counterfeit fraud.
Visa USA said the key is to implement a
streamlined, online-only version of EMV chip. When EMV was created,
the cost and complexity of connecting a merchant POS device to some
telecommunication networks was excessive. To counter this, “floor
limits” were established to create a magnetic strip alternative,
which also acted as an answer to potential fraud.
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By GlobalDataThe shift, VISA said will increase transaction
safety, without the more complex and expensive cards, terminals and
processing capabilities that are needed to support offline
authorisation.
The difference between an online and off-line
PIN is that an online PIN is not stored on the card, and when a PIN
is entered at the POS terminal, it is encrypted and sent online to
the host for validation.
During an off-line PIN transaction, the PIN
entered at the POS is sent to the chip card for validation –
therefore taking place within the card.
VISA said it will continue to support a range
of cardholder verification methods with EMV chip, including
signature, online PIN and no signature for low value and low risk
transactions. But it expects the industry to move to new and
dynamic forms of cardholder verification in the future.
