BSP evaluating banks’ compliance with EMV technology

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has started assessing the full compliance of banks with the mandated shift to the Europay, Mastercard, Visa (EMV) technology after the June 30 deadline.

BSP Deputy Governor Chuchi Fonacier said the central bank would sanction banks that failed to fully comply with the transition to the EMV technology as the June 30 deadline was not extended.

“There are banks that are almost compliant, but there are also banks that were left behind,” she said.

EMV is the global security standard for payment transactions that is more secure than a magnetic- stripe card wherein stored information is static and can be copied with relative ease and cloned by fraudsters.

Full compliance constitutes completion of all EMV-related activities from upgrading or enhancement of back-end processes and systems, ATM and point of sales (POS) terminals to the replacement of magnetic stripe credit as well as debit or prepaid cards, including distribution of EMV-compliant cards.

According to Fonacier, the BSP has given banks enough time to comply with the mandated shift to the EMV technology.

As early as 2013, the BSP had ordered banks to shift to the EMV technology through the enhanced information technology risk management.

All BSP-supervised financial institutions were given until January last year to migrate to EMV technology to drastically reduce, if not totally eliminate, fraud due to card skimming and counterfeiting as the new technology provides cardholders better protection from unauthorized access to their accounts.

However, issues hounded the shift to the EMV technology, prompting the BSP to issue Memorandum 2017 – 019 to accelerate full migration of the entire payment systems network to EMV technology and setting the deadline to June 30.

Fonacier said the review would be based on the level of compliance of banks.

Aside from banks, BSP Governor Nestor Espenilla Jr. had said clients should cooperate to fully complete the migration to the safer and more secure EMV technology.

“As far as we are concerned, if a bank has completed and has made ready all of the cards, given due notice to its customers, but on June 30 some customers have not claimed yet, to us we can look at that as substantial compliance already because they have done what they are supposed to do,” Espenilla said.

The BSP chief explained customers have to physically go to their branches, update their information and change their personal identification number (PIN).