MANILA, Philippines – The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) on Tuesday reiterated calls for banks to fully shift to chip-based cards using the more secure Europay Mastercard Visa (EMV) technology for their depositors and credit card holders following recent reports of compromised ATMs of BDO Unibank Inc.
READ RELATED STORY: BDO says it got reports of likely compromised ATMs, urges affected clients to contact bank
Asked about the central bank’s actions regarding incidents of ATM skimming attack, Pia Roman-Tayag, head of BSP’s inclusive finance and financial consumer protection said: “Ang ginagawa po ng Bangko Sentral d’yan ay talagang pinu-push na po namin ang mga bangko na mag-full migration na doon sa tinatawag na EMV (What the Bangko Sentral is doing is that we are really pushing banks to have a full migration to what we call EMV).”
EMV technology uses microprocessor chips, instead of the black magnetic strip, embedded in debit, prepaid, or credit cards to store the cardholder’s information.
Fraudsters usually target the magnetic strip of an ATM card to steal information, including the PIN number of the cardholder using a cheap skimming device.
Compared to the traditional cards, Roman-Tayag said chip-based cards are less prone to skimming frauds.
“Kung talagang pure chip at wala po ‘yong magnetic stripes, hindi na po talaga maii-skim ‘yan kasi iba po ang teknolohiya n’yan. Parang meron po ‘yang code at nag-iiba iba po ‘yan every time na may transaction, so mahihirapan po talaga na maging biktima pa ng ganitong klaseng fraud,” she said.
[If the chip is only used without the magnetic stripe, it would no longer be skimmed because of its different technology. It has a code that changes every time a transaction is made so it would be difficult to become a victim to these kinds of fraud.)
Roman-Tayag also said the BSP had repeatedly ordered banks to complete their shift into EMV-chip based cards.
“Hindi pa rin po kasi kumpleto kasi po ‘yong migration niya madami pong kailangang palitan hindi lang po doon sa mga millions of cards pati po lahat ng ATM lahat din po ng POS [Migration is not yet complete among banks because there are a lot of items that need to be changed not only in the millions of cards but also in all ATMs and point-of-sale terminals],” she said.
The latest reminder was issued on June 9 through a memorandum, wherein the BSP imposed a deadline of June 30, 2018 for banks to “fully comply with the BSP EMV migration requirement.”
This means that besides distributing EMV-compliant cards to their clients, banks are obligated to upgrade their back-end processes and systems as well as their ATM and POS terminals.
Banks are also mandated to intensify public awareness programs for its clients to replace their old cards with EMV cards.
The BSP has also ordered banks to set aside funds or provisions to cover for “probable fraud losses that may arise from counterfeit fraud or skimming attacks.”
