In reply to Philip Andreae.

The NFC business case is close in nature to that of merchants upgrading to EMV in the U.S. from a cost perspective. Either way, terminals will have to be upgraded.

I think too much credit is being given to EMV for fraud reduction. Remember, it only addresses card present fraud, whereas, it is online fraud that is growing from a combination of advances in technology, more people (globally) using computers, global e-commerce, and also because of EMV. In Canada, for instance, they are around 90% EMV deployed and over 70% of their fraud is now online/card not present. The migration of fraud from card present to card not present after EMV deployment is about symmetrical. So, what are you really gaining...particularly for the expense?

As far as "why is the U.S. behind," remember that the EU did not go to EMV for security reasons, they went to EMV because of unreliable telecommunications systems - particularly between the various countries. The telecommunications systems in the U.S. have been very reliable which is why there was no need to incur the cost. If we can leapfrog EMV technology and go to something better, why only "catch up" on EMV?

If a new and promising technology is now here that can address both card present and card not present environments with all of the security benefits of EMV as well as a large degree of flexibility, then my opinion is we should look that way instead.

I should also emphasize that the Target breach has nothing to do with EMV. The breach would still have occurred. Even if they were fully EMV, because the RAM scraping malware was inside each POS, it would have likely been configured to capture the credit card number during the handoff when it must be decrypted (plain text) in order to proceed with the EMV transaction. So, you would still have a breach and you would still have a credit card (and other) data compromise.