BDO urges clients to shift to safer ATM cards

BDO Unibank is urging its retail clients to avail of the EMVchip ATM debit card from their branch of account to earn the benefit of its fully EMV-certified ATM network.

The regulatory requirement to shift to EMV or the Europay MasterCard Visa is part of the banking industry’s move to produce a more effective way of significantly reducing counterfeit fraud, skimming and other related attacks perpetrated in magnetic stripe payment cards.

The bank said it started to make the EMV-chip ATM debit cards available free of charge to its clients since the third quarter of 2016.

However, to date, there is still a low figure of card pickups from the branches, which means a large number of clients are still using the magnetic stripe-only ATM debit cards.

For corporate or payroll clients, BDO will make the EMV-chip cards available at their respective HR offices by December 31, 2017.

“Making the shift to the EMV-chip ATM debit card is one way to protect the clients from electronic fraud,” said BDO Executive Vice President and Transaction Banking Head Edwin G. Reyes.

He explained that, the new card “has enhanced security features, which include among others, encryption locks and keys to authenticate the card and the cardholder's transaction, protecting card data from being compromised.”

“We hope our customers would embrace this significant improvement being implemented by the entire banking industry,” Reyes said.

The EMV-chip ATM debit cards complement the almost 4,000 BDO ATMs nationwide which have already been made EMV-certified by the bank. BDO was the first bank in the industry to fully retrofit its ATM network to allow EMV-chip card transactions. (JAL)