Bukar Charges Stakeholders on EMV compliance

Kyari Bukar, managing director, ValuCard Nigeria has urged for a more rapid adoption of and compliance with EMV principles and practices by all stakeholders in the e-payment industry.
This is consequent on the directive by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) that from April, 2009 all new payment cards issued must be EMV complaint.  Mr. Bukar made the call in a paper titled “ÉMV Implementation in Africa: Nigeria as a Case Study…Reality or Façade?” he presented at CardExpo Africa 2009 held last week. The event put together by Intermac Consulting has as theme: Channel Strategy, e-payment in a Global Recession.
Bukar also called on Risk Managers in financial institutions to take more proactive steps to contain the magnetic stripe fraud menace, a current plaque in the e-payment sub-sector, while he charged human resource managers to conduct more stringent and regular background checks on employees.
EMV is an international e-payment standard developed by Europay, MasterCard & Visa (EMV),  to maximize e-payment security by replacing magnetic stripe cards with EMV chip and pin cards. As a risk and liability management tool, it guarantees fraud protection for issuers, acquirers and cardholders.
According to him, a truly EMV card has such exceptional security features as, Chip & PIN, Card Verification Values (CVV) at the back of the card and its alternate, iCVV, recently introduced by Visa and embedded in the Chip of the card.  
He added that for cardholders to enjoy the peace of mind they truly deserve, a truly EMV environment demands that the EMV card must interact with EMV-compliant acceptance devices.  For instance, an EMV–compliant Point of Sale terminal must be PIN Encryption Device certified while ATMs that are not EMV-compliant cannot accept EMV cards.  Other requirements, he said, include an EMV-certified 3rd party processor and switch, EMV ready front end processors and EMV personalization bureaus.
He cautioned cardholders to be wary of some cards that are being propagated to be EMV but works in non-EMV certified ATMs and PoS. 
The cheering news he said, is that "there is at least a Visa-certified EMV processor and PoS Acquirer in Nigeria that has been deploying EMV-certified Points of Sale terminals to accept Visa EMV cards, working with Nigerian Banks to upgrade their ATMs to EMV Levels I and II as well as issue truly EMV cards such as VPAY and Visa cards."
Commenting on the reality in the Nigeria market space today, Kyari noted amongst other issues that only a few serious-minded banks in Nigeria have made significant moves to migrate from the fraud-prone Magnetic Stripe cards to truly EMV Visa cards.