Creating Competitive Advantage Through the EMV Smart Card Standard

 

The world’s payment infrastructure is going through a major upgrade to EMV, the smart card standard mandated by Europay, Mastercard and Visa to combat fraud. But EMV also offers significant opportunities for creating competitive advantage. UK banks are losing £400 million a year through card fraud but they are losing far more than that due to commoditization, primarily through rate wars and imminent fee reforms. Rate wars cost UK banks £1 billion a year from customers switching card companies, unable to see the difference between the cards other than the rates they offer. In addition, the threat of fee reforms is pressuring banks to reduce the transaction fees charged to merchants, which could result in a loss of revenues estimated at another £1 billion a year. Commoditization may soon be costing UK banks £2 billion a year, a problem at least five times as great as fraud.

 

Aneace Haddad’s A New Way to Pay is about enabling cardholders and merchants to see card payment as something exciting and different, so that they will focus on the added value that your card provides, rather than simply the cost it represents.

 

Your current definition of a successful EMV deployment may focus on eliminating the technical problems, controlling fraud and delivering the project on time and on budget. In this book, the definition of success is far more ambitious. The move to EMV is such an important event that if your deployment is successful according to these basic criteria but fails to differentiate your brand, fails to position payment as an integral and strategic tool that justifies the on-going transaction fees and commissions paid by merchants, and fails to make your card far more attractive to both customers and merchants, then the migration to EMV cannot be considered truly successful.

 

(Publisher: Gower)

 

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