The banking and financial industries have been doing everything in their power to counter the influence and growth of bitcoin and other digital currencies. These digital currencies with secure and transparent features combined with ease of use have been offering tough competition to traditional banking and financial sector. The competition has grown to such an extent that financial institutions are now considering bitcoin as a threat to their business and they have started finding ways to keep up with the cryptocurrency industry by exploring ways to incorporate blockchain technology into their operations.
Meanwhile, banks are tweaking their existing products to match different aspects of bitcoin. In one such move, banks across the world have started issuing EMV enabled credit cards to enable secure transactions. These ne cards have an EMV chip integrated into them. The EMV chips will contain all the user information embedded into it. With the introduction of EMV based credit cards, the probability of card’s data getting compromised is very low, These cards can now be swiped anywhere without any worries.
The new EMV based credit cards store user information on the chip itself instead of saving them all on a magnetic swipe. Storing information on magnetic strip reduces the threat of card skimming to zero. Even if fraudsters want to skim credit card info and create a clone of it, they will now be needing specialized equipment and access the card for a longer duration.
With EMV based cards, banks are trying to bring the security levels associated with credit cards close to that of bitcoin. However, unlike bitcoin transactions, credit card transactions made using EMV based cards can still be reversed unlike bitcoin transactions.
Introduction of EMV based credit cards subjects retailers to an increased burden as they should ensure that their POS terminal is compatible with newer credit cards, else they will be unable to process transactions.
Source: Inside Bitcoins
