Litan, the Gartner analyst, is skeptical about whether the credit card industry will invest the money and time required to switch to a more secure system, like "smart cards" embedded with chips, which are used in some foreign countries.
Some foreign countries... just a few dinky little countries, you'd think, to hear that American... I have had an EMV card for 8 years here in Britain, and around 100 countries around the world have already migrated, in fact the developed world outside the US are either using them or planning the changeover. In Europe migration to EMV is nearly 100% now. Fraud figures have shown a clear decline (80% drop in France) when compared to magnetic stripe only, and fraud has moved to areas where there is no chip enabled infrastructure, like the USA or to card not present transactions, such as Internet payments. The U.S. market has been caused to stir following announcements by Visa and MasterCard of specific incentives to migrate to EMV. The United States had previously rejected the migration to EMV on the basis of a nonexistent business case and a complex infrastructure. The attitude of some issuers initially began to change as they found U.S. cardholders were increasingly facing issues when travelling abroad and trying to pay with magnetic stripe cards in markets where merchants rejected non-chip payments.
