Experts: Swipe-And-Sign Gone By 2015

Major U.S. issuers are moving away from swipe-and-sign in a bid to prevent the kind of data breaches that have led to serious questions about payment-data security.

Experts speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week confirmed that swipe-and-sign cards will be a thing of the past as the United States moves toward EMV-secured payments, Ars Techina reported on Feb. 8.

“Chip-and-PIN makes it much harder to copy a card when data is stolen,” an official from Symantec told the committee earlier this month. “It also makes it harder to steal data in the first place due to encryption. It also makes physically stealing a credit card less useful, since you don’t have a PIN.”

During an earlier a Senate subcommittee hearing last week, representatives from merchant and consumer-advocacy groups stressed the need to require PINs with EMV smart card transactions, in defiance of Visa’s and MasterCard’s plans to allow issuers to roll out less-secure chip-and-signature EMV cards.

In an interview with Market Platform Dynamics CEO Karen Webster, MasterCard’s Carolyn Balfany explained how a variety of security tools are essential to keeping global payments networks safe. Hear what she has to say by clicking here.

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