EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, a global standard for inter-operation of integrated circuit cards (IC cards or "chip cards") and IC card capable point of sale (POS) terminals and automated teller machines (ATMs), for authenticating credit and debit card transactions.
It is a joint effort between Europay, MasterCard and Visa to ensure security and global interoperability so that Visa and MasterCard cards can continue to be accepted everywhere. Europay International SA was absorbed into MasterCard in 2002. JCB (formerly Japan Credit Bureau) joined the organization in December 2004, and American Express joined in February 2009. IC card systems based on EMV are being phased in across the world, under names such as "IC Credit" and "Chip and PIN".
The EMV standards define the interaction at the physical, electrical, data and application levels between IC cards and IC card processing devices for financial transactions. There are standards based on ISO/IEC 7816 for contact cards, and standards based on ISO/IEC 14443 for contactless cards (PayPass, payWave, ExpressPay).
The first standard for payment cards was the Carte Bancaire M4 from Bull-CP8 deployed in France in 1986 followed by the B4B0' (compatible with the M4) deployed in 1989. Geldkarte in Germany also predates EMV. EMV was designed to allow cards and terminals to be backwardly compatible with these standards. France has since migrated all its card and terminal infrastructure to EMV.
The most widely known chip card implementations of EMV standard are:
- VSDC - Visa
- M/Chip - MasterCard
- AEIPS - American Express
- J Smart - JCB
- D-PAS - Discover/Diners Club International.
Visa and MasterCard have also developed standards for using EMV cards in devices to support card-not-present transactions over the telephone and Internet. MasterCard has the Chip Authentication Program (CAP) for secure e-commerce. Its implementation is known as EMV-CAP and supports a number of modes. Visa has the Dynamic Password Authentication (DPA) scheme, which is their implementation of CAP using different default values.
In February 2010 computer scientists from Cambridge University demonstrated that an implementation of EMV PIN entry is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack; however, the way PINs are processed depends on the capabilities of the card and the terminal, showing that attacks against card security are possible depending on the implementation.
In May 2010, a press release from Gemalto (a global EMV card producer) indicated that United Nations Federal Credit Union in New York would become the first EMV card issuer in the US, offering an EMV Visa credit card to its customers.
Read more about EMV: Differences and Benefits of EMV, EMV Commands, EMV Transaction Flow, Control of The EMV Standard, List of EMV Documents and Standards, EMV Implementation