The U.S. financial services industry is the middle of a technology revolution, and if you’re like most Americans, you’re adjusting to dipping instead of swiping.  It’s the new world of credit cards – magnetic stripes are giving way to chips in cards, and it is changing the security of payments for good.

Six months ago, on October 1, 2015, the nation began the transition to more secure chip cards.  Shifting America’s more than 8 million merchants over to chip technology is an enormous task. In fact, it’s the largest change your wallet has seen in forty years. The U.S. is joining more than 80 countries around the world in upgrading payment card security to the chip standard. To give you some context, magnetic stripes utilize the same technology as cassette tapes, so in a way it’s like upgrading from cassettes to Spotify. More important, the chip card migration is addressing the single largest source of fraud in retail stores today. In 2015 alone, more than $6 billion of those electronic payments were fraudulent.

continue reading »