Data breaches like the one at Target that exposed information for as many as 110 million customers would be pointless for criminals if U.S. banks switched to the secure, chipped smart-card technology common in about 80 other countries.

Wary U.S. consumers are pushing for the change.

“The Target breach is a watershed event,” said Mary Ann Miller, managing director of fraud consulting and industry relations at Nice Actimize. “Consumer confidence has eroded.”

Even as public pressure mounts for a more thief-proof system, it looks like the United States will remain behind the curve in credit card security until at least October 2015, credit card security analysts say.

That’s the target date that Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover have set for when they want the entire industry to stop using insecure magnetic strip cards and adopt the secure chip cards and chip readers.

EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa and is the technology standard for the chips. Additional encryption on the chip makes it almost impossible for criminals to duplicate the card. That personal information encrypted on the chip remains blocked to any card readers until a consumer enters a PIN to activate it.

Switching systems for the largest and most complex market in the world will be a costly and tedious process, Miller says. ATMs, bank authorization systems, retailers’ card readers and the cards themselves will need to be changed.

“It’s going to be one of the largest conversions of our payment system in many, many years,” Miller says.

More than 40 million EMV cards will be distributed this year, and in 2015, there will be a significant ramp-up, Miller says.

Anxious consumers wonder why the U.S. has not already adopted the more secure credit card system.

“The size and scope of the Target data breach has set off alarms across the industry,” said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, an association that represents companies using the chip technology. “Until recently, this kind of fraud has been considered manageable. It would be easier to absorb the loss from the counterfeit fraud than to replace the 1.2 billion credit cards and debit cards that are in the market today and 10 million card readers that are in retail stores.”

Only 1 percent of U.S. cards are EMV-chipped.

“It would cost tens of billions of dollars if all of the cards and terminals were replaced at once,” Vanderhoof said. The real cost will be considerably less than that because banks will phase in chip cards when older cards expire and merchants naturally will replace and upgrade their card readers to those with chip-reading technology for the same cost as any other reader.

The cost of the card with the chip still is more expensive, but it’s moving closer to the cost of the magnetic strip, says Doug Johnson, who oversees risk management policy for the American Bankers Association.

Banks have started giving out chipped cards, and retailers are starting to figure out their strategy to switch over technology. If retailers opt not to switch their devices, they will be liable for any fraud, Johnson says.

“This is just one more tool that banks and retailers are deploying,” Johnson said. “It’s not the last tool. We will continue to look at other ways to keep the environment safe.”

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