The American Bankers Association’s Card Policy Council is calling for all consumer-facing industries to implement the latest payment protection technologies, including EMV chip cards, tokenization and biometrics. “We invite retailers to partner with banks by taking common sense measures like activating their chip credit card readers and accepting secure mobile wallets,” says the Card Policy Council’s Jess Sharp.
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It is to be hoped that the member banks will listen to this guidance. They now have the permission of an authority. Said another way, they have been stripped of one more excuse. It is ironic that the American banking industry, that has demonstrated such leadership in the application of information technology in general, has been so resistant to moving away from the magnetic stripe and to the mobile computer with all of its dramatic security advantages.
The excuse for not moving to EMV was that merchants were resistant to paying for new hardware. We now have demonstrations of software-only solutions for mobile payments.
Ask yourself how we would do retail payments if we were to start from scratch today, if there had never been mag-stripe cards or even chip cards.