Pressure will be increasing on Barbados and other countries which still use magnetic strip debit and credit cards to make the switch to cards with an integrated chip.
Word of this comes from Dave Cole, chief executive officer of Caribbean Electronic Payments, who said it was imperative that all jurisdictions eventually adopt the global standard.
Addressing a Europay, MasterCard and VISA Compliance Meeting at the Courtyard by Marriott hotel last Tuesday, he noted that Britain and the rest of Europe had achieved an 80 per cent adoption rate of the new cards.
Noting that Britain was the first country to make the switch because of high levels of fraud and subsequent government pressure, he said the rate of global adoption had slowed in the last few years because the United States did not want to make the switch.
“Because the US is now migrating, every other country in the world which hasn’t migrated will be under greater pressure from VISA and MasterCard, central banks, international banking organizations and so on to move to this standard,” he said.
Cole, who has been advising banks across the globe on cards and other payment solutions for the past 25 years, said global compliance had to become a reality.
“One of the big problems we’ve had is the interoperability between magnetic strip cards and chip cards. In some countries of the world, [in] Europe for instance, they will turn down magnetic strip cards . . . .
“The US is moving because their cards are being turned down. Without this single standard we will not have the international interoperability we had with magnetic strip cards 15 years ago,” he said. (NB)
