America goes Fish, Chip and PIN (EMV), at last

What most people find hard to believe is that USA, and India, two of the most technological advanced countries (well, it could be tough believing that for India if you have been there) still use magstripe cards. Magstripes are unsafe (easy to clone and super error prone) and so yesterday that I wouldn’t be surprised if Moses paid for things with that in the desert.
Finally, heavens intervened. Visa and MasterCard, in USA, are migrating their credit cards to EMV standards by April 2013 (Fish, Chip and PIN). Now that counts for something as most Americans prefer credit cards (easy money) and there are more of that circulating around than debit and prepaid cards.
So good bye to card clone frauds. But trust those boys, they are  coming out with something else soon 🙁

Author: dejiolowe

Adédèjì is the founder of Lendsqr, the loan infrastructure fintech powering lenders at scale. Before this, he led Trium Limited, the corporate VC of the Coronation Group, which invested in Woven Finance, Sparkle Bank, Clane, and L1ght, amongst others. He has almost two decades of banking experience, including stints as the Divisional Head of Electronic Banking at Fidelity Bank Plc. He drove the turnaround of the bank’s digital business. He was previously responsible for United Bank for Africa Group’s payment card business across 19 countries. Alongside other industry veterans, he founded Open Banking Nigeria, the nonprofit driving the development and adoption of a common API standard for the Nigerian financial industry. Beyond open APIs, Adédèjì works deeply within the fintech ecosystem; he’s the board chairman at Paystack. Adédèjì is a renowned fintech pundit and has been blogging on technology and payments at dejiolowe.com since 2001.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.