Broad EMV adoption in the US may not occur until 2020

According to a recent report by Forrester Research, while the adoption process drags along, however, merchants should be fully aware that, although EMV chip technology prevents skimming fraud, it should not be seen as a solution for deterring massive card breaches.

Since encryption takes the added step of obscuring card details sent over payment networks, and tokenization would allow for encrypted card data to be sent from the accepting point-of-sale (POS) terminal to a PCI-DSS-compliant service provider initiating the tokenization process, merchants should be protected against major payment card breaches through added investments in these technologies, the report continues.

To make payment transactions significantly more secure, Forrester recommended that security and risk professionals demand tokenization from all payment chain participants. Contactless payment methods offer built-in tokenization to protect card numbers from being exposed on the internet. And the prospect of shifting to contactless payments would also result in merchants spending less money complying with PCI-DSS, since they would no longer need to store credit card numbers with the digital wallet systems.