BSP urges depositors to ask for EMV-enabled ATM cards

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) on Wednesday said clients must ask their banks to replace their automated teller machine (ATM) cards with the latest Europay, MasterCard, Visa or EMV-enabled cards.

"We're calling on depositors, all banking clients, that if they haven't yet changed their cards to EMV," they should do so, BSP Assistant Governor Chuchi G. Fonacier told reporters on the sidelines of a Senate committee hearing.

The Senate Committee on Banks, Financial Institutions and Currencies convened Friday morning and questioned officials of BDO Unibank Inc. and Bank of the Philippine Islands regarding the compromised ATMs and internal errors to the detriment of depositors' accounts.

The BSP has ordered all banks to be EMV-compliant by June 30, or face penalties.

"Unlike a magnetic stripe card, every time an EMV card is used for payment, the chip on the card generates a unique transaction code that cannot be used again. This feature, known as dynamic authentication, makes it difficult, if not virtually impossible, and costly for fraudsters to counterfeit EMV cards,” the BSP said in a separate primer.

"We're calling now on the banking public, should your card not be EMV enabled, meaning it's not yet having that EMV technology, and then they should go already to the bank and have it changed," Fonacier said. — VDS, GMA News