EMV: SmartMetric Plans US Banks’ Adoption of Smartcards

• SmartMetric, Inc. CEO declared that “The European Payments Council (EPC) recently announced it's considering a ban on magnetic stripe cards within the next couple of years. This will force the last remaining standout amongst large consumer markets, the United States, to adopt Smart Cards and replace the insecure old mag-stripe cards”.
• US-based bank Wells Fargo & Co (which benefits from a large number of branches) announced it was now testing EMV cards with its customers. 15,000 frequent travellers will be targeted by this initiative by mid-2011: university college students and customers of its private bank.
• JP Morgan Chase & Co challenges Wells Fargo & Co to become the first main US bank to deploy EMV payment cards and intends to attract its competitors’ wealthiest customers.

• Europe is leading the way in this field and security became a strategic marketing argument. The deployment of the EMV standard in Europe for security and fraud prevention reasons causes magnetic stripe cards acceptance issues inside its borders. American issuers then have to face significant losses of their annual sales figures and must respond dissatisfied customers’ needs: most of all, those travelling on a regular basis and spending the most.
• A study conducted by Aite Group indicates that in 2008 ten million American customers have had trouble using their cards abroad and that four million dollars transactions were lost to merchants as well as 447 million dollars to American issuing banks.
• The fraud prevention sector can only be satisfied with these major security evolutions. Nevertheless, in a non-100% EMV world, can we really expect that magnetic stripe cards will be eradicated? And, if not, what are the possible solutions to secure payments made with magnetic stripe cards?

SmartMetric developed a smartcard endowed with biometric ID features