A Meeting of the Cross-Industry EMV Coalition Group to Work towards a Collaborative, Timely, and Effective Transition to EMV Payments in the U.S.

The Smart Card Alliance announced the formation of an independent, cross-industry organization, the EMV Migration Forum (the Forum), on July 31st. The Forum supports the alignment of the EMV implementation steps required for global payment networks, regional payment networks, issuers, acquirers, processors, merchants, and consumers to successfully move from magnetic stripe technology to secure EMV contact and contactless technology in the United States.

The first EMV Migration Forum meeting was held on September 12-13 in Purchase, NY, hosted by MasterCard Worldwide.  This was an open meeting for all stakeholders who wished to attend.  There was an overwhelming response to attend this meeting, resulting in registrations closing early after reaching the meeting capacity of 130 people.  The meeting attracted a diverse group with ten different stakeholder categories represented, including 22 issuers, 20 acquirers/processors, 11 merchants, and 4 regional debit networks.  The agenda included a mix of panels of representatives from the payments brands, issuers, merchants, processors, acquirers, debit networks, and device manufacturers discussing how EMV impacts each group. Also included were break-out discussion sessions around popular topics including: EMV migration challenges, debit networks, EMV value proposition and communications, EMV lessons learned, card-not-present fraud, testing and certification, and business case.  After each breakout session, the groups gathered together to share the highlights of the discussions and the recommendations that were developed during the group sessions.

The feedback from the attendees at this first meeting resulted in the Forum starting several working committees which will begin meeting regularly via conference call in October to start working on some of the challenges raised and the coordination requirements needed to support the industry alignment necessary to foster the migration towards EMV in the U.S.