It is highly likely that you have recently received a new, updated credit card from at least one of your credit card vendors. If you did, it is almost certainly one of the new “chip-enabled cards.” You most likely are wondering “What is this all about?”

The United States is very late to the game in the chip card market. These have been in use in Europe for a number of years. It is all about security. After the cards were introduced in Europe, there was a sharp decline in credit card fraud. Without getting into too much technical detail, the old magnetic strip cards allowed the retailer to store card data in their systems, making them ripe for data theft. The chip cards, referred to as EMV (Europay, Mastercard, Visa) utilize a process referred to as tokenization to increase security. In lieu of recording the credit card number a one-time “token” number is substituted in the Read More