Israel's financial services industry has been given three-and-a-half years to migrate their customers from mag-strip to EMV chip credit cards.
According to local paper Globes, Bank of Israel supervisor of banks David Zaken has ordered the industry to make the move to the more secure standard in a bid to slash card fraud.
The process of issuing new cards and upgrading ATMs and point-of-sale terminals is set to cost tens of millions of dollars, says Globes.
The move will bring Israel in line with most of Europe which made the switch several years ago and has since seen a significant fall in fraud rates. The US is currently following suit and is set to migrate by 2015.
In India, new RBI rules came into force at the end of June which mean that all mag-stripe can only be used domestically. Customers who want to use cards abroad have to request an EMV chip and PIN option. Even then, banks will set a spending limit on transactions overseas based on the customer's risk profile.