EMV Credit Cards: What Are They?

The EMV technology will soon be a huge hit in the United States. As a consumer, it always pays to know what this term pertains to. The EMV has been a mainstay in many European countries when it comes to their credit cards. Bank of America was one of the first institutions in the US to announce that they will be integrating EMV on their consumer cards. So what are these EMV credit cards?

EMV Explained

EMV is an acronym for EuroPay, MasterCard and Visa and is a standard for inter-processing of IC or integrated credit cards. When cards have this kind of chip embedded in them, it becomes easier to authenticate both credit and debit transactions. The three huge names entrenched in EMV have joined forces to make sure that security and interoperability can be achieved.

Cards that have the EMV technology are also called IC credit cards, PIN, and Chip cards. Although the system is predominant in European countries, many banks in the United States express that the demand in the country is not enough to counterbalance the costs involved in making the change.

The EMV Advantage

There are two types of cards with EMV: the contact and the contactless cards. If you have either of them, you can actually experience a ton of benefits. Among them are the following:

EMVs offer more security than traditional credit cards when it comes to fraud. Regular cards simply depend on encoded data from the magnetic stripe found at the back of the card.
When performing a transaction with a card that has EMV, there is a unique digital signature for that particular transaction. This digital signature is only present in the chip and it strongly demonstrates the authenticity of the card in the offline store. Plus, the virtual seal also acts as a combatant against any fraudulent payments made with your credit card.
Many consumers are now paying for goods online. While conventional cards come with anti-fraud protection, the EMV chips provide a stronger barrier against illegal acts. They can secure online transactions to further protect the card holders while providing efficient assistance to the merchants and the issuers as well. This is performed through the exceptional online cryptogram solely created for EMV cards.
If your card has EMV, you can enhance your verification methods.
EMV cards can also store more information than cards that have magnetic stripes.
EMV Card Protocols

There is a transmission protocol that card readers and the chips use to communicate with each other. What happens is that when a command is sent to the card, the card will immediately process it. Then, it will act in response to the protocol, which can be any of the following:

Application block or unblock
Get data
Generate cryptogram for an application
Block the card
Obtain processing options
Change the PIN
Verify the transaction
Read the records
Commands that include verifying and selecting transactions and internal authentication are defined by inter-commerce commands. These are commonly utilized in several card applications, including those found in SIM cards of GSM phones.