Following a mandate from Bangko Sentral Ng Philipinas, the Philippines’ Central Bank, BancNet is leading the program to migrate all issuing and acquiring banks to EMV by January 2017. The Philippines has in excess of 100 banks which service more than 76 million banking customers across the country.

FIME’s EMV team is supporting BancNet with consulting services to apply best practices for EMV to the migration process. Visa’s Card Specification VIS1.5 is being used as the foundation for the migration and FIME is supporting the domestic payment network in reviewing its proprietary terminal and banking host EMV specifications. To enable BancNet to effectively support the country’s banking community, FIME is developing a series of certification services and test tools which banks can use to verify the compliance of their EMV cards and terminals, and confirm that acquirer host networks are implemented correctly. FIME will also offer on-site services for member banks to enable fast and successful certification test projects.

“We look forward to a successful and smooth EMV migration with FIME’s support,” comments Karen Ching, Program Manager at BancNet. “We value the experience that FIME brings, having completed 10 other domestic EMV migration projects across the world, and recognise the benefits that having its test laboratory and experts so close to us brings. This is an important step for the Philippines to combat ATM and payment fraud by keeping pace with the regional trend towards EMV implementation.”

“FIME is proud to be supporting BancNet with this EMV migration,” adds Arnaud Peninon, Director of FIME Asia-Pacific. “We are offering our experience to BancNet so that it can put in place the tools and services that the issuers and acquirers need to ensure efficient migration. We look forward to providing ongoing support as the network develops in the future.”