When you make a purchase via EMV card, the merchant never receives or transmits your actual card number. These chips create a one-time-use code when inserted into an EMV reader: using that code to process a payment instead of the card number printed on the card. One of the main benefits of EMV chip technology is protecting cardholders' credit card information.
Once commonplace, counterfeit fraud - in which a cardholder's information is collected, stored and reprinted on a different card - has declined sharply since EMV chip technology began to appear.Īccording to Visa, counterfeit fraud dropped 76% between 20 among merchants who adopted EMV card readers. These chips can only be authenticated by special readers, making them more secure than stripe-only cards.Ī primary benefit of EMV chip technology is preventing counterfeit fraud. What is EMV chip technology?ĮMV is short for Europay, Mastercard and Visa: the three companies that created the EMV standard.ĮMV cards store cardholder information on a metallic chip instead of in a magnetic stripe.
Many merchants now require consumers to pay with the EMV chip instead of swiping their card.
EMV chips, which come standard in many new credit and debit cards, supplant the magnetic stripe on the back of the card with a more secure data-storage technology.
