Another industry alliance joined the chorus urging businesses that process debit and credit cards to implement EMV payment chip technology to combat fraud.
EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard® and Visa®, the developers of the technology. It has been used in Europe since 1992, and moves are underway to make it the standard payment type in the United States.
The Smart Card Alliance Payments Council wrote in a whitepaper released that a multi-layer approach where businesses use EMV chip, tokenization, and encryption security technologies in conjunction will secure the payments infrastructure and prevent card fraud.
The details of how to implement these layers would have to account for the organization’s unique requirements, environment and budgets, but everyone should be considering how to work with these three technologies, the authors said.
“This white paper is a good start for any stakeholder starting to consider their best approach for implementing the three technologies,” Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, said in a statement.
The white paper discusses the authorization process for chip payment and the value of EMV to both card issuers and merchants, presents different ways encryption can be implemented to secure payment data, and identifies tokenization initiatives focused on issuing and working with tokens.
Chip technology cuts down on counterfeit cards because it requires cryptographic card authentication. The EMV specification supports several ways to authorize transactions. End-to-end and point-to-point encryption immediately protects the card data as it enters the system—swipe or key entry—so that unauthorized individuals cannot access the information.
Tokenization uses surrogate values that have no value once it is taken out of the system. Under tokenization, there will be no credit card numbers to steal, but rather some other data that is useless if it is taken out of the merchant system. ApplePay uses tokenization to secure payment card data by not letting the number leave the mobile device.
The “Technologies for Payment Fraud Prevention: EMV, Encryption and Tokenization” whitepaper is available on the Smart Card Alliance site.
Participating organizations include: Accenture, American Express, Bell ID, CH2M Hill, Chase Card Services, CPI Card Group, Datacard Group, First Data Corporation, Fiserv, Gemalto, Giesecke & Devrient, Heartland Payment Systems, Ingenico, INSIDE Secure, MasterCard, NXP Semiconductors, Oberthur Technologies, SHAZAM, Tyfone, Valid USA, Vantiv, Visa Inc., Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), Wells Fargo.