The announcement that a US credit union will be the first to issue EMV cards proves there is more than one way to make the business case for chip. The United Nations Credit Union says it wants its customers to be able to use their cards when travelling. 

Too often we're told that chip is uneconomical in the US because of the huge cost to upgrade all retail merchant sites.  But that assumes there is just one purpose for chip: to combat skimming and the use of cloned cards in POS terminals.  As the UNFCU shows, chip card issuance in the US can be decoupled from the merchant enablement issue; benefits can be realised without touching a single US bricks and mortar merchant. 

And the chip platform, being multiprogrammable, has other numerous other potential uses to be exploited by innovative institutions.  The cryptographic engine built into EMV cards can be put to use to digitally sign online transactions to prevent Card Not Present fraud.  Pure play cyber merchants could push for chip cards as the preferred means for safeguarding customer identity and account details.  This kind of POS terminal-at-home application using connected readers is actually more feasible in the US which leads the way in smartcard reader innovation, thanks to the penetration of FIPS 201 ID cards.