Chip and pin

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Qassem: Network International is the first independent card solutions provider in the Middle East to be certified by both Visa and MasterCard, and serves more than 29 banks.

The payment card industry has been talking about the move to chip and PIN EMV (the industry standard agreed by Europay, MasterCard and Visa) payment cards for a long time, but we are finally starting to see signs of activity in the Middle East.

What is more, issuers are seeing the potential of the chip to offer new and enhanced services.

Banks may put loyalty programmes on their chip, such as the Selektpoints programme for example, or security applications like MasterCard's Cardholder Authentication Programme (CAP).

"When the cardholder want to do a transaction on the internet, the CAP application on the card would generate a dynamic one-time password which the cardholder could then use to authenticate themselves when they are doing the transaction," says V.S Chandrasekhar, Vice President Product Delivery, MasterCard Worldwide, South Asia Middle East & Africa (SAMEA), MasterCard. "That provides complete security to the cardholder because the bank that has issued the card will be absolutely assured because that password has been generated by an application on the card."

The bank issuing the card would also issue a reader, about the size of a pocket calculator. The user inserts their card into the reader, which generates a one-time pass code displayed on an LCD screen. Entering the code when carrying out an online purchase, for example, would authenticate the transaction.

"Versions of that reader are also now available where that reader can be connected directly into your PC," says Chandrasekhar. "The dynamic password gets picked up from the reader and gets directly entered into the field where you're making the purchase."

In other regions of the world, criminals have tended to migrate towards markets using card products with lower security standards - in other words, markets that continue to use mag stripe technology could become attractive targets as neighbouring countries adopt chip and PIN cards.

"Technology is the backbone of the card industry and a key factor in the drive against fraud," says Theo Benz, head of fraud control Middle East and North Africa, Visa International. "The roll out of EMV (Chip and PIN) provides consumers with a more secure method of carrying out their transactions because the chip provides far more secure storage of data on the card, while the PIN ensures authentication of the card holder."

However, the Middle East has a relatively low level of card fraud, so this may not provide sufficient incentive for banks to upgrade their cards.

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