EMV, mobile payment news from the 2013 Smart Card Alliance Payments Summit
08 February, 2013
category: Contactless, Financial, NFC, Smart Cards
The 2013 Smart Card Alliance payments Summit saw executives from MasterCard and Visa spoke about the payments industry, explained their road maps and provided vision for the future payments infrastructure.
The summit saw head of authentication product integration for Visa, Stephanie Ericksen, reveal new details that will expand Visa’s roadmap to include EMV.
Ericksen revealed Visa’s proposed solution to the Durbin Amendment’s requirement that card issuers permit at least two unaffiliated network routing options on their cards. This requirement allows merchants to choose their preferred debit network.
Ericksen revealed that Visa will make some of its EMV chip technology available free of charge in conjunction with a generic, unbranded Application Identifier — the number that identifies the payment system and the card type. A common AID means that payment processors can route transactions to a merchant’s preferred network.
Accorsing to Ericksen, Visa will also expand its road map to account for the liability shift for counterfeit card fraud for ATMs, which will carry a deadline of October 1, 2017. Visa’s deadline date is a year later than the one that MasterCard has imposed for ATMs.
MasterCard — represented at the summit by group executive of global products and solutions for U.S. markets Michael Weitzman — explained how EMV will impact the future of payments. Weitzman revealed that by 2015, the number of globally connected devices will outnumber people two to one — presenting an opportunity for payments innovations that should not be missed.
Weitzman implored payment card providers to issue cards with dual contact/contactless capabilities, and called for merchants to install terminals to accept both modalities. Stating that “online is better, but doesn’t work in every case,” Weitzman revealed that MasterCard supports both on and offline transactions in the new EMV landscape.
From an issuer’s perspective, customer experience will likely be a major priority with EMV. Part and parcel to that experience is a level of service education as well as consumer education. A point of agreement among the panelists was the need for a common language and communication strategy, with the EMV Migration Forum’s Communications and Education Working Committee a valuable asset in the realization of this goal.
Not to be forgotten, Salt Lake City was one of the two pilot cities for Isis, and the summit addressed the progress being made with the mobile wallet solution. The Utah Transit Authority (UTA) has implemented Isis and the new application is quickly becoming one of the best use cases of Isis in Salt Lake City.
The UTA features open contactless fare payments, allowing riders to pay directly with an American Express, Discover, MasterCard or Visa contactless card stored in their wallet, and is now set to accept Isis mobile NFC payments as well.
Since it began accepting mobile payments, the UTA has increased revenues by 25%, with contactless transactions rising from 400 to 1,000 per day and counting.