MasterCard Follows Visa To A More Comfortable EMV Experience

On Wednesday April 27, MasterCard unveiled its M/Chip Fast, which is an almost identical version of Visa's Quick Chip For EMV. Both approaches cut down on some authentication so that the EMV card can be removed a couple of seconds after the shopper dips it. And both Visa and MasterCard are only pushing it for retailers that have the greatest need for speed, which has the unfortunate result of guaranteeing vastly different EMV experiences as shoppers go from merchant to merchant.

In a GuestView this week, Mercator Advisory Group's Tim Sloane argued that by encouraging different kinds of EMV experiences, the card brands might be impeding the rapid adoption of EMV. In MasterCard's statement, the brand said it was important that it join Visa's effort and that EMV can only succeed through industry standardization. "MasterCard called for the industry to activate current action-oriented forums like the Payments Security Taskforce and the EMV Migration Forum to align behind a common approach to address perceptions of speed of a chip card transaction," the statement said, before quoting Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise risk and security for MasterCard saying "Ultimately, we all want to deliver great experiences for consumers and merchants. That's why we believe that M/Chip Fast or any similar product should be implemented in consultation with the industry. With that holistic view, interested merchants can easily integrate this with their current systems to provide both speed and security for all chip cards.”