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Visa said Tuesday that it is making an aggressive effort to push U.S. consumers onto credit cards with embedded security chips, a technology that has become prevalent overseas.
Visa also said that it sees an end to the common "mag-stripe" credit card, which the United States has used for decades. In its place, Visa said it will move to both so-called EMV or "Chip and PIN" technology. Visa also again endorsed near-field-communication (NFC) technology, which embeds payment information inside phones.
"Many reading the news may be wondering 'why now?'," Ellen Richey, Visa's chief enterprise risk officer, wrote in a blog post. "For several years, Visa has been talking with clients and merchants on this subject – and now more than ever before, we're hearing confirmation that chip is the right direction for the U.S. Over the last year, for example, we've seen financial institutions issuing chip cards to international travelers. And some large merchants have already begun installing chip terminals.
"We believe our program offers the right level of direction and encouragement for merchant and issuer adoption of chip — at the right time," Richey added. "With a commercial framework in place, our goal is to enhance security and support the next generation of payments."
Visa said it still sees a limited role for signature- and PIN-based cards, especially in low-value transactions. Over time, though, both will be phased out.
In the future, the new chip technology could be itself supplanted or supplemented with so-called dynamic authentication, which tries to create a unique card that can't be duplicated. An example of dymnamic authentication might be a time-sensitive token that could be transmitted via a phone, and matched up against the credit-card number. Another might be the so-called Magneprint technology, which attaches a unique identity to a magnetic-striped card based on the layout of its atoms.
Visa's push is to speed up mobile payments, and to improve international interoperability and security, Jim McCarthy, global head of product, said in a statement.
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