Exactly right, Joe. The knee-jerk reaction that regulators had after the Target breach (in particular) and the various breaches following Target, had special Senate and Congressional committees scrambling to show their constituents that they were doing something about data security.

Unfortunately, this translated to the escalated deployment of EMV, a 20 year old technology for which a business case could never be made in the U.S., prior to these pressures. The unfortunate part is that legislators who primarily do not know payments or technology, equivocated EMV to protecting against data breaches and this just isn't the case.

The way to reduce payment card fraud is to deploy true point-to-point encryption to devalue credit card data before any point in which an attacker can obtain it used in conjunction with tokenization. Additionally, the multi-layered or defense-in-depth strategy of strengthening cardholder authentication such as cloud based Host Card Emulation (HCE) with transparent multi-factor authentication via mobile device for both card present and CNP environments will further devalue credit card data as a target for hackers.

The breaches will continue and they will get worse until we take credit card data security out of the hands of merchants.