Credit card companies play security catchup
By ROELAND VAN DEN BERGH - The Dominion Post |
| Alarming News for the future of magnetic stripe cards? |
Rising fraud and the Rugby World Cup have pushed credit card companies to ditch magnetic swipe cards in favour of more-secure chip cards from next month. Visa regional manager Ian McKindley said all credit cards issued from April 1 would have a microchip embedded in them.
All 2.6 million Visa credit cards on issue in New Zealand will be replaced with chip cards within four years.
Visa’s Country Manager for New Zealand, Sean Preston, said Visa was working with financial institutions and retailers to upgrade more than 2.6 million Visa cards in New Zealand[1] and thousands of merchant point of sale terminals and ATMs to chip and PIN technology.
“From April 2010, all new Visa credit cards issued in New Zealand will feature secure embedded smart chips to give New Zealanders a higher level of confidence in the security of their transactions,” Mr Preston said. “This will be followed by the upgrade of Visa debit and reloadable prepaid cards from April 2012,” he added.
As part of a range of security improvements, signing for credit card payments will be banned from April 2012 and a Pin to verify transaction will become mandatory for swipe cards. About a third of customers still sign for credit card transactions.
"While signatures served us well over the years it has never stopped a fraudster," Mr McKindley said.
Editor's Note: We manufacture an EMV (Smart Card Reader) version of our PCI 2.0 Certified PIN Entry Device. Rather than swiping the card in a magnetic card reader, you would insert your card in our chip reader and, as is done now, enter your PIN. For more information on our EMV Card Reader, please contact me.
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