Banks in China are preparing their ATMs to meet with the EMV international standard in a bid to avoid card fraud.

The central bank, People's Bank of China (PBC), has already stepped up the EMV program and amended rules on financial IC cards. Select cities in China will pilot EMV migration this year, and local commercial banks are starting controlled deployments for accepting chip cards for POS terminals.

EMV is the merged standard by Europay, MasterCard and Visa, which is an essential step in countering plastic card fraud and bring new value added services.

Statistics show that card fraud costs the banking industry an estimated annual global loss of 2.5 billion US dollars.

"Although the economic loss from card fraud is still not that high in China, the potential migration of card fraud to China cannot be underestimated," said Sharon Dickie, director of global marketing for software and security in NCR Financial Solutions Division, which has close ties with Chinese banks.

It is critical for China to be part of this global migration, in light of its potential as the world's largest credit card market, the increasing flow of foreign tourists into china and the upcoming 2008 Olympics and 2010 World Expo, Dickie said.

"All these drive toward the need for China to comply with the EMV international standard ," said Dickie.

"Based on our proven global experience, we recognize that chip-card migration will be a challenging task as it does not only involve the front-end hardware but also the back-end applications and its infrastructure," said Dickie.

To protect banks' investment, NCR recommends local banks participate in EMV-Ready program and upgrade their ATMs with EMV technology as soon as possible.

"Getting EMV compliance is part of NCR's total approach to securing the entire cash cycle," said Dickie.

As the world's largest supplier of ATMs, NCR would help Chinese banks to minimize the cost and fraud, she said.

(Xinhua News Agency September 21, 2005)