A European-wide security initiative to tackle credit card fraud will change the way consumers pay for goods and services by credit card, writes Laura Slattery
Signing the receipt printed off from the card verification machine will no longer be required - after all, forging signatures is a relatively easy task for fraudsters. Instead, cardholders will key in a PIN - personal identification number - at the point of purchase.
Spearheaded in Ireland by the Irish Payment Services Organisation (IPSO), the Chip and PIN Migration Programme will give Irish consumers more protection from card crime from 2005.
Chip technology will replace the magnetic stripe currently on the back of all cards.
It is designed to eliminate the possibility of the card being copied.
The electronic data in the chip are much more difficult to duplicate than the information in the magnetic stripe, according to Mr Barry O'Mahony, who oversees the programme at IPSO.
In Britain, a third of all cards now include the chip, although the PIN keypad system has not yet been introduced.
Here, the first cards to carry the new technology will be issued next year, but consumers will continue to sign for goods and services until 2005.
By then, all credit and debit cards will be reissued with chip and PIN compatibility and the days of searching your handbag or jacket pocket for a pen and separating the white and yellow receipts will be over.
"The reality is that people will only be getting excited about it when they actually put the PIN into the keypad to pay for their groceries," says Mr O'Mahony.
At the announcement of the initiative last May, IPSO's chief executive, Mr Stewart MacKinnon, said the industry body envisaged "a near total elimination" of plastic card counterfeit fraud under the programme, which he said would also support the battle against lost and stolen card fraud.
