LIVINGSTONE MARUFU
Zimbabwe’s Euro Visa- Mastercard (EMV) chip technology compliance rate has risen to 49% from 38% in February this year as the fight against card cloning escalates.
Out of 5.1m cards, around 2.49m cards were EMV compliant.
It is estimated that more than ZWL$300m was lost due to card cloning this year.
In his mid-term monetary policy statement, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor John Mangudya said the central bank will continue to emphasise the need for financial institutions to implement effective risk management measures to mitigate cyber risk in line with the Risk-Based Cyber Security Framework.
“Compliance with the EMV chip technology now stands at 49% for cards, 63% for ATMs and 56% for POS machines.
“The central bank urges all payment systems providers and participants to work towards full EMV compliance to reduce fraud risk and increase security for the transacting public,” Mangudya said.
Under the Risk-Based anti-money laundering / combating the financial terrorism (AML–CFT) Framework, the bank continued to enforce a risk-based approach on payment system providers and participants, by ensuring that those entities and products presenting the highest risks received a proportionately higher level of oversight/supervision, he said.
“The bank requires that mobile money operators fully comply and enforce anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism measures. Board involvement in AML/CFT issues is critical,” Mangudya said.
RBZ said financial services providers have to phase out non-EMV compliant cards.
The idea of EMV adoption was to protect card users against fraud at the point of sale machines and make magnetic stripe cards’ information impossible to copy.
The technology has inbuilt capability which has an effect of decreasing card fraud as the EMV-enabled cards contain a microprocessor chip that stores information securely.
The expertise also carries security credentials that are encoded by the card issuer at the time each card is personalised for an individual cardholder using user-specific keys.
EMV, which is a technology that uses secret cryptographic keys to protect clients against fraud at the point of sale, contains embedded microprocessors that provide strong transaction security features and other application capabilities.
The encoding of these credentials helps to prevent fraudsters from creating counterfeit cards (“cloning”).
EMV cards cannot be duplicated and utilised to complete fraudulent transactions, unlike mag-stripe cards, which are easy to duplicate because they lack the security features of microprocessor chip
