The growing adoption of contactless payment cards in the United States could open the door to a more fraud-resistant and, until now, expensive, security format that has taken off almost everywhere but in the U.S., reports American Banker, a CardLine sister publication. U.S. card issuers have shown steadfast resistance to the Europay/MasterCard/Visa security standard, which uses debit and credit cards with embedded chips and requires cardholders to enter PINs to authorize transactions at the point of sale.

Though executives generally agree EMV offers improved security over standard magnetic stripe cards, they also say U.S. banks and merchants have little interest in footing the bill to distribute chip cards or installing the necessary readers at the point of sale.

Contactless payment cards, however, could make the anti-EMV argument obsolete, payment executives say. "There’s no reason we can’t support all the cardholder-verification methods we have today," including EMV, using contactless cards, says Simon Pugh, the head of MasterCard Inc.’s worldwide global center of mobile excellence."If you look at the technology, it’s easy.

If you look at the business processes and how you introduce it in a controlled and global fashion, it will require some thought."

The technical specifications of contactless and EMV are closely aligned; both formats define the way a card communicates with a card reader, Pugh says.

For EMV, the readers access data stored on the chips in the cards to verify cardholders are entering the correct PINs.

For contactless cards, the chips transmit the card account number to the reader using wireless technology. Mohammad Khan, founder and president of Vivotech Inc., a provider of contactless payment terminals and software, says as more countries switch to EMV, criminals will shift their energy to the United States, where the mag-stripe infrastructure is easier to circumvent. "The U.S.as a country is open to attack. The fraud people always move toward the weakest point," Khan says. "Every other country in the world has a deadline to move to EMV. I believe the industry needs a deadline inthe U.S. as well."