CARTES North America to debate future of EMV and NFC payments

CARTES North America to debate future of EMV and NFC payments

The European CARTES was arguably one of the biggest shows for NFC this year along with WIMA and a couple of other events. However, CARTES North America is now gearing up to bring its expo and conference state side in March and one big thing that will be debated is the future of EMV and NFC payments. If you are already in payments you will know the US chose not to embrace chip and PIN and EMV early on and now the focus is on “if not then, when?”

EMV payments still have a steep curve before they become commonplace in the US and NFC payments are already being introduced. NFC mobile wallets could well convince payments companies to embrace the technology on this side of the pond. CARTES points out that there are still mixed reactions to both EMV and NFC payments and security, interoperability, infrastructure and investments may well as yet derail EMV from taking off, although we see that is unlikely with the sheer investment going in to NFC payments. CARTES also sees that NFC mobile wallets and NFC payments could complicate matters and not simplify them.

According to Daniel Chatelain, Managing Director of the BayPayForum in San Francisco, “Payment systems worldwide are feeling the pressure of innovation, but when it comes to day-to-day transactions at the point of sale, the US has always preferred convenience to security compared to Europe. With the last Visa announcement on EMV, things may change quickly. The entire industry is now embarking on a complete redeployment of terminals to accept chip and PIN or chip and signature along with mobile NFC and contactless payments. If all this happens, the industry and its stakeholders will be busy for years to come.”

CARTES North America looks at how will EMV and NFC payments becoming adopted in the US?

There is no doubt that America has fallen behind because it did not back EMV payments at the beginning. Perhaps with NFC payments hot on its heels both technologies will reduce adoption costs as they carry each other to ubiquity. Either way a main focus of CARTES North America will be to debate the situation focusing on security and investments required to make EMV and NFC payments a reality all across the United States.

“To what extent EMV payment will be the next evolution in the card payment space and what complementary payment technologies may co-exist is a hotly debated topic,” said Isabelle Alfano, Event Director of CARTES in North America. “We’ll be exploring these issues and ways to help issuers, acquirers and merchants sort fact from fiction.”

Obviously, here at NFC Rumors we focus more on NFC payments than we do EMV, but the fate of both technologies rides together.

CARTES has grown to become the world number one security and payment event and that now includes NFC payments. Access control is also expected to be a feature of the show and it is likely that we can expect to see as many as 400 exhibitors and up to 20,000 visitors if the CARTES North America shows is as big as its European cousin.

If you want to attend CARTES North America it is being held between March 5-7 2012 in Las Vegas and you can book your tickets here. NFC payments are coming and Google Wallet is the first to market, how the industry will evolve from here will likely be a top priority for CARTES North America.