Smart Cards

Restaurants have been slow to bite on EMV. To get adoption percolating, vendors are introducing methods that let customers add a tip after making a payment or pay with tabletop devices. Paying with EMV cards has been an adjustment for the average U.S. consumer. Cards are no longer swiped. They …

The global chip card standard known as EMV became a reality for U.S merchants, acquirers, and issuers in October 2015. That’s when the liability for counterfeit card transactions at the point of sale shifted, by network rules, from issuers to merchants if the merchants weren’t prepared to accept EMV cards. …

The seemingly plodding U.S. migration to the EMV chip card standard may not be so plodding after all. Visa Inc., in data released Friday, says consumers made 1 billion Visa chip card transactions in March, a tripling of the 303.3 million in March 2016. The number of transactions has steadily …

Shopify Inc. is often thought of as a platform for smaller e-commerce merchants, but it offers processing services for some 65,000 physical-world sellers, as well, and on Thursday it unveiled a new EMV card reader that features a Bluetooth low-energy link to mobile devices and what the company says is …

About 60% of the nation’s approximately 450,000 ATMs can now accept EMV chip cards, according to industry executives familiar with the years-long process of transitioning from magnetic-stripe cards. “We look at true chip transactions that are coming from terminals,” says Bruce Owens, vice president of product for the North American …

After years of card-data breaches and other bad news, four very encouraging trends are emerging that bode well for better security. Here’s a quick look at all four: Integrators are taking the QIR program seriously. When the PCI Security Standards Council and Visa Inc. initially released the Qualified Integrator and …

Contactless payments may seem like the next evolution of the U.S. payments industry, but the challenges confronting that technology may be greater than those of the ongoing chip migration, industry observers suggested on Tuesday at an industry trade show. “At the moment, contactless is much more complex, more expensive,” Allen …

Merchant acquirer Square Inc. has again improved the speed of EMV transactions made with its contact chip card reader, lowering the speed from 4.2 seconds, as reported in November, to 3.6 seconds, as noted by Jack Dorsey, Square chief executive and chairman, in a Twitter post on Friday. Earlier in …

Part I of this three-part series outlined the development of the realization by the Fed’s payments task forces that payments are complicated, difficult, and expensive to change in order to make them safer and more efficient.  This installment deals with the growing concern about security threats that are shaping the …

For a moment, I thought I was a thief. For a split second as I drove away from the ExxonMobil fuel pump, I thought I forgot to pay. In actuality, I had just used the ExxonMobil Speedpass+ app to make a contactless payment for fuel for the first time. ExxonMobil …