EMV Group Rebrands to Go Beyond Chip Cards

The industry-led EMV Migration Forum is changing its name and expanding its focus to accommodate the myriad changes that are happening alongside the move to chip cards.

Now called The U.S. Payments Forum, it will address the challenges that retailers, acquirers, issuers, processors and technology companies face given the ongoing development of tokenization, contactless payments, mobile technology, point to point encryption and other digital technologies.

"There are also many other payment technologies that require the same breadth of stakeholder engagement, cooperation and coordination for successful implementation in the U.S.," said Randy Vanderhoof, director of the forum, in a July 20 release.

The group will provide guidance on technical issues related to new technology, provide feedback on specifications from standards groups and engage in projects to encourage consumer adoption and enable a more consistent user experience.

The forum will continue to support the U.S. chip migration, with a particular focus on segments that have not completed chip card implementation. Some segments, particularly smaller businesses and younger consumers, are experiencing spikes in chargebacks as they adopt chip-card payments.

Founded in 2012, the EMV Migration Forum offers education materials and testing guides. It has also served in an analytical capacity, tracking the chip card migration's impact on high volume transaction events such as Black Friday and the countdown to the card network imposed liability shift shift in October 2015.

"Most consumers have at least one chip card in their wallet and are able to use the chip to shop frequently and the payment networks are already reporting drops in counterfeit card fraud. With the progress, there is still work to be done," Vanderhoof said in the release.