Contactless smart cards—such as bank cards and access control badges—have become ubiquitous due to their convenience and speed. These systems rely on Near Field Communication (NFC), a short-range wireless technology that operates within a few centimeters. EMVCo specified the payment protocol for …
A Complete Overview of the Partial Approval
Special thanks to Edina Kovács, who helped me write this post. What is Partial Approval? Typically, a card payment begins with authorization, where the acquirer asks the issuer whether the cardholder has enough money to pay for the goods or services. The issuer answers with a 'Yes' or 'No'. …
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An easier way to certify Visa card compliance
Issuers must validate their cards before the deployment to ensure that the card personalization is compliant with the card profile they reported to the card scheme and the card profile is compliant with the card scheme's regional requirements. Before the card personalization begins, the card …
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Bypassing PIN for High-Value Payments
The card payment works because we generally trust the system, we trust its elements, we believe that we don't risk high fraud in normal circumstances. But from time to time, we read about possible or actual fraud, which can weaken or collapse our beliefs. The fortunate situation is when researchers …
R.I.P. magnetic stripe
More than 20 years ago, I presented the advantages of the chip on a bank card compared to the magnetic stripe. Since then, EMV smart cards have become the preferred method in the card payment area. According to the articles, Mastercard will be the first to phase out magnetic stripe …