EMV Standard
EMV (Chip and PIN) is an acronym for Europay, MasterCard and VISA the three companies which originally cooperated to develop the standard for interoperation of IC Cards (Integrated Circuit Card). The purpose, in short, is to attain two major benefits: improved security, and the possibility for finer control of "offline" credit card transactions.
When a customer wishes to pay for goods using this system, the card is placed into a "PIN pad" terminal which accesses the chip on the card. Once the card has been verified as authentic, the customer enters a 4-digit PIN, which is checked against the PIN stored on the card. If the two match, the transaction will be automatically completed.
The chip which is being used within the EMV standard contains the same information as the magnetic stripe on the back of the card, but in addition to that a great number of encryption algorithms in order to enhance the authentication process of the card, which makes it extremely difficult to copy.
The two most widely known implementations of EMV standard are:
- VSDC – VISA
- MChip - MasterCard.
MasterCard has a Chip Authentication Program (CAP) for secure e-commerce. Its implementation is known as EMV-CAP.
Chip and PIN is the name of a government-backed initiative in the United Kingdom to implement the EMV standard for secure payments. |
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