EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is a global standard for inter-operation of integrated circuit cards (IC cards or “chip cards”) and IC card capable point of sale (POS) terminals and automated teller machines (ATMs), for authenticating credit and debit card transactions.
EMV is a joint effort initially conceived by Europay, MasterCard and Visa to ensure the security and global interoperability of chip-based payment cards. Europay International SA was absorbed into MasterCard in 2002. The standard is now defined and managed by the public corporation EMVCo LLC. JCB (formerly Japan Credit Bureau) joined the organization in December 2004, and American Express joined in February 2009. China UnionPay was announced as member in May 2013, and Discover joined the corporation in September 2013. The EMVCo members MasterCard, Visa, JCB, American Express, China UnionPay, and Discover have an equal 1/6 interest in the standards body. IC card systems based on the EMV specification are being phased in across the world, under names such as “IC Credit” and “Chip and PIN“.
The EMV standards define the interaction at the physical, electrical, data and application levels between IC cards and IC card processing devices for financial transactions. There are standards based on ISO/IEC 7816 for contact cards, and standards based on ISO/IEC 14443 for contactless cards (PayPass, PayWave, ExpressPay).
The first standard for payment cards was the Carte Bancaire M4 from Bull-CP8 deployed in France in 1986 followed by the B4B0′ (compatible with the M4) deployed in 1989. Geldkarte in Germany also predates EMV. EMV was designed to allow cards and terminals to be backwardly compatible with these standards. France has since migrated all its card and terminal infrastructure to EMV.
The most widely known chip card implementations of EMV standard are:
VSDC – Visa
M/Chip – MasterCard
AEIPS – American Express
J Smart – JCB
D-PAS – Discover/Diners Club International.
Visa and MasterCard have also developed standards for using EMV cards in devices to support card-not-present transactions over the telephone and Internet. MasterCard has the Chip Authentication Program (CAP) for secure e-commerce. Its implementation is known as EMV-CAP and supports a number of modes. Visa has the Dynamic Passcode Authentication (DPA) scheme, which is their implementation of CAP using different default values.