Sunday, January 8, 2012

What is EMV?

EMV stands for Europay, Mastercard and Visa. It's the underlying technical standard which defines the Chip and PIN program. The standard defines the characteristics and behaviour of the card, the terminal (POS, ATMs as well as transactions carried over the Internet) and the issuer.


All cards which are compliant with the EMV standard carry a chip (unlike the old cards which just had a magnetic stripe at their back) and usually require a PIN to authorize a transaction.

EMV is supposed to be secure.[1] It safeguards customers and banks against various types of frauds that are possible with old style magnetics cards as well as PIN-less transactions. Plain old magnetic cards are extremely easy to duplicate; not so with EMV based cards.

Unlike ISO-8583 (and other ISO standards), EMV is freely available in the form of 4 books.[2]

Future posts on this blog will dive into the details of the EMV standard. Most of the information presented here will be based on several years of practice in the field as well as freely available information on the Internet.

Please feel free to post your questions about the topic!



[1] It's said that Chip and PIN has been hacked.

1 comment:

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    ReplyDelete