Following its decision last year to push the adoption of EMV in the United States, Visa has moved to clarify that this does not mean the introduction of chip and PIN cards.
In August Visa set out a roadmap for the US adoption of EMV, largely to help prepare the country for the impending widespread arrival of NFC-enabled mobile payment devices.
In a blog post, Stephanie Ericksen, head of authentication product integration, says the company has received a lot of support from industry players for its stance but also a lot of questions.
"One thing that's clear from the questions is that there's a lot of confusion around the myth that EMV means "chip-and-PIN." It doesn't in many countries, including the US. That's because, in the US, we can rely on online processing where transactions are transmitted in real-time to the issuer for approval. With that in place, there's no need for the offline authentication that was the genesis of chip-and-PIN," says Ericksen.
Meanwhile, adoption of EMV as the universal payment standard gained further traction in 2011, with official figures revealing that over 42% of all payment cards and nearly 76% of terminals in circulation globally are based on the technology. Today, there are over 1.3 billion EMV payment cards in global circulation and more than 20 million terminals active worldwide, according to EMVCo.