Do foreign credit cards work in the US?
April 3, 2018
Fake people with real credit cards
April 17, 2018
There have been numerous credit card innovations in the past few years like EMV microchips and biometrics. For whatever reason no one has considered combining the two. OK, they may not go together like peanut butter and jelly or chips and salsa but its not like they are polar opposites. That was until January of 2018.
Introduced by the Bank of Cyprus the first credit card combining an EMV chip and biometrics was released by Gemalto, a leading digital security company based in Amsterdam. The card can be dipped or used for contactless payment. When a card is inserted it powers the biometric scanner and the purchaser places their finger on it. Their fingerprint has already been stored on the chip and the transaction is authenticated. No PIN needs to be entered and no battery is required since the scanner draws power from the POS terminal.
For merchants in Cyprus here is the best part: the card works with existing POS terminals. No hardware upgrade is necessary which is certainly a huge relief for them. This technology ups the ante on security since only the account holder will have their fingerprints scanned and therefore will be the only people able to use the chip. Chip-and-PIN it seems is now obsolete.
While this may spell the end of physical credit card fraud it will be a long time before this is the norm around the world. Not only will it take time to work out any kinks in Cyprus, which has a population of about 1.1 million and is therefore a good test market, but it will take several years before all cards can be upgraded in Europe much less the rest of the world. Considering that we are at least half a decade behind Europe when it comes to just about everything it will be even longer before it is introduced here in the US. We can dream though, can’t we?
