Payments glossary · Standards
EMV
EMV is the global technical standard for chip payment cards and terminals, named after Europay, Mastercard and Visa. It is now managed by EMVCo and also underpins contactless payments, mobile wallets, 3-D Secure and payment tokenisation.
How EMV works
An EMV chip generates a unique cryptogram for each transaction, so data copied from one payment cannot simply be replayed to make a working counterfeit card, which was the weakness of magnetic stripes. The card and terminal also agree how to verify the cardholder, for example by PIN, or by the customer's phone biometrics when paying with a mobile wallet.
EMVCo is collectively owned by American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay and Visa. As well as chip and contactless specifications, it publishes standards for EMV 3-D Secure, payment tokenisation, QR code payments and Secure Remote Commerce, and runs testing so that cards and terminals from different vendors work together.
For merchants, EMV matters mainly at the point of sale. Terminals must be EMV-certified and kept up to date to accept chip and contactless cards. In many markets that moved to chip, card schemes shifted counterfeit fraud losses onto whichever party, merchant or issuer, had not adopted chip technology, so relying on magnetic stripe acceptance is costly. Online, EMV-based standards such as 3-D Secure and network tokens bring similar protection to card-not-present payments.