EMV is a standard for interoperation of IC cards ("Chip cards") and IC capable credit card terminals. The name EMV comes from an acronym of Europay Mastercard Visa, the three companies which originally cooperated to develop the standard. Modern IC card credit payment systems are generally based on EMV. These systems are marketed as "IC Credit", or "Chip-and-Pin".

Detailed information about EMV may be obtained from EMVco

The EMV standard defines the interaction at the physical, electrical, data and application levels between IC cards and IC card processing devices for financial transactions. Portions of the standard are heavily based on the IC Chip card interface defined in ISO 7816.

Differences and Benefits of EMV

The purpose and goal of the EMV standard is to allow secure interoperation between EMV compliant IC cards and EMV compliant credit card payment terminals throughout the world. There are 2 major benefits to moving to EMV based credit card payment systems: improved security (with associated fraud reduction), and the possibility for finer control of "offline" credit card transaction approvals.

EMV financial transactions more secure against fraud than traditional credit card payments which use the magnetic stripe data encoded on the back of a credit card. This is due to the use of assymetric encryption algorithms such as DES, Triple-DES, RSA and SHA to provide authentication of the card, the processing terminal and the transaction processing centre. However, processing is generally slower than an equivalent magnetic stripe transaction due to the overhead of the cryptography. The increased protection from fraud is liekly be more favourable to banks/credit card issuers than to merchants or consumers.

Although not the only possile method, the majority of implementations of EMV cards/terminals confirm the identity of the cardholder by requiring the entry of a PIN (Personal Identification Number) rather than signing a paper receipt.

Control of the EMV standard

The standard is defined and managed by the public corporation EMVco. Recognition of compliance to the EMV standard (i.e. device certification) is issued by EMVco following submission of results of testing performed by an accredited testing house.