LIVINGSTONE MARUFU
LISTED financial services group FBC Holdings has set up an Europay, MasterCard, and VISA (EMV) replacement centre to substitute magnetic stripe with micro-processed chip cards to curb cyber-related activities.
EMV is a global standard for credit and debit payment cards based on chip card technology. The development comes at a time when clients of various banks have been defrauded by cyber fraudsters who copied data from the magneticstriped cards and stole money from those accounts.
Roy Nyakunuwa, the acting head of FBC Group Marketing, told Business Times that POS terminals are now EMV compliant as the bank increases its effort to be 100 percent compliant by year end. He said an express replacement centre has been set up at the FBC Centre branch for clients’ convenience.
“Upon replacement of the old magnetic-stripe card, it is blocked to pave way for the new chip and pin EMV Complaint Card which comes in with an added layer of security to protect our valued customers against ill practices such as card cloning,” Nyakunuwa said.
EMV Card technology is a joint effort between Europay, MasterCard and Visa to ensure enhanced card security features to curb cyber-related crimes. Nyakunuwa said a high number of the bank’s clients had replaced their old magnetic-stripe cards with the EMV-compliant chip and pin cards this year.
“We expect to have all debitmagnetic-stripe cards in circulation replaced in the near future. This will result in the phasing out of magnetic-stripe cards which will no longer be issued, going forward. A chip and pin card contains the chip technology, which secures client’s account information by making it difficult for fraudsters to duplicate or access the data of clients’ cards,” he said.
The key features of the new EMV cards comprise of full colour spherical FBC logo for all clients and white logo for private banking clients, description of issuing unit (FBC Bank/ FBC Building Society), FBC watermark in capital letters, gold/silver chip, category of the card (private banking, scholar, silver, corporate, junior and senior), card validity, and the card holder’s full name.
Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has given local banks up to 31 March 2020 as the EMV deadline. RBZ started the journey to promote the adoption of EMV technology in December 2014 when it urged banks to ensure compliance in order to minimise card-related risks.
The technology has in-built capability that decreases card fraud. According to Zimswitch, the EMV compliance rate has just passed 60%.
