EMV: Towards the end of magnetic stripe cards in Germany?
- As the Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany) has had to deal with increasing bank card fraud, it now wishes to see the end of magnetic stripe cards and advocates the generalization of the EMV cards. German savings banks have been issuing EMV cards since 1996 and support this decision, as the DSGV (federation of German savings bank), which considers that EMV cards are "more efficient and safer".
- From the 1st of July 2011, debit card payments will exclusively be chip and PIN; by 2012, cash withdrawals at ATMs will necessarily use EMV mode. Other operations (printing of receipts, for instance) should then be based on the same principle.
- This significant desire to abandon magnetic stripe cards illustrates German pragmatism. Up util now, fraud prevention measures have been implemented to hinder fraud attempts which use already compromised data (card skimming). According to studies conducted by ADN’co, the compromise of magnetic stripe data may account for more than 50% of fraud. Therefore, the interest of such measures is not only in the reduction of the financial losses due to fraud, but also the significant reduction over time of back-office workload for banks.
- In France, magnetic stripe cards are only used for toll roads and car parks, but these structures have already started replacing their magnetic stripe cards with EMV cards (this changeover should be completed sometime during 2013).
- It should be mentioned that SEPA compliant cards (SCF) must comply with the EMV standard. In parallel, the EPC is growing more and more interested in fraud prevention issues and is now questioning the interest of issuing magnetic stripe cards. Visa Europe proposes products adapted to this new concept and MasterCard imposes that their card stocks migrate to EMV.