In the ever-prognosticating world of payments, there’s at least one technology transition that’s a sure thing — the EMV migration planned for October 2015.
A handful of payments power players have already begun to prepare for the migration, and now Square plans to join the fray. The San Francisco-based company announced Wednesday that later this year it will begin offering EMV card readers to its customers.
Short for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, EMV is a payments standard in which tiny computer chips are embedded into credit cards to create a unique impression that’s difficult to counterfeit and relatively impervious to the hacks of fraudsters, especially when compared to the magnetic stripe that’s still commonly used in the US.
A major difference between how chip cards and mag-strip cards are used is the manner in which they communicate with the reader. While Mag-stripe cards are swiped through the card reader, EMV cards are inserted into the reader and left in place for the duration of the transaction, while the reader and the embedded chip in the card talk back and forth.
The rest of the article at Zdnet.com.