climate change

"EMV Shift Is Not Australia's Only Smart Card Driver
Australian IT

Jul 19 2005 : Australia’s banks have been criticized for being slow to adopt EMV cards, possibly due to card fraud rates reaching a historic low in the Asia-Pacific region, at 3 per cent of transactions. The global fraud rate runs at 7 per cent, but as fraudsters are displaced from neighboring EMV card-using countries, Australia may need to accelerate its migration to reduce the risk of increased fraud. EMV payment infrastructure and applications need to be deployed in Australia to maximize the value of EMV cards, but EMV card readers

are being phased in and MasterCard is confident that EMV migration is on track.

Card issuers in Australia will mainly be responsible for establishing EMV payment infrastructure but the banks are shortly expected to migrate to EMV cards to avoid the January 2006 liability shift for fraud and to provide new value-added services. Banks will assess additional reasons to offer chip cards, such as transit, or parking payments, but need a push from increased fraud rates and from the card associations to issue EMV cards on a mass scale. Since banks typically offset EMV migration costs against potential losses to card fraud however, the status quo is unlikely to change in the near future.

Smart cards are increasingly being used for transit ticketing in Australia, and the state of Victoria is to roll out plastic cards for its trams, buses and trains, which can be reloaded at self-service terminals, over the phone or via the Internet. In other deployments, the states of Western Australia and New South Wales are also introducing smart cards for transport, with the WA transit cards potentially extending to small-value transactions, railway station parking, and building access. In other words, the global EMV liability shift is not the only driver of smart cards for everyday transactions in Australia."
from www.epaynews.com