BancNet has completed the upgrade and migration of its switch to be compliant with the Europay-Mastercard-VISA (EMV) standard. EMV is a global security standard for payment transactions. It ensures interoperability between chip cards and devices that accept these cards. With its EMV-compliant switch, BancNet is now ready to process EMV-enabled interbank transactions of its members and affiliates.
With EMV technology, a computer chip is embedded in a debit or credit card. The EMV chip is a microprocessor providing strong security based on dynamic cryptography. It generates a unique encrypted code for every financial transaction. This code will not work a second time, thus rendering any traditional way of illegally copying account data and codes such as the personal identification number (PIN) useless. A chip card is therefore more secure than a magnetic- stripe card wherein stored information is static and can be copied with relative ease and cloned by fraudsters. BancNet adopted VISA’s Card Specification VIS1.5 as the foundation for its members and affiliates’ migration to EMV chip card technology.
Aside from debit and credit cards, automated teller machines (ATMs) and payment and cash-out machines at cashiers’ counters (also known as POS terminals) also must be configured to be able to read and process chip cards according to EMV standards. Each bank’s switch or host system must also be EMV-compliant and certified as such.
EMV compliance is mandated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) for the local banking industry in order to drastically reduce, if not totally eliminate, fraud due to card skimming and counterfeiting as it provides cardholders better protection from unauthorized access to their accounts. The EMV standard is now widely used in Europe, Canada, Latin America, Africa, Middle East and some Asia-Pacific countries.
BancNet has 127 members and affiliates with over 80 million cardholders, 19,000 ATMs and more than 132,000 payment and cash-out machines nationwide.
