US retailer Wal-Mart is calling on the nation's banks to move to the international EMV standard for securing financial transactions at the point-of-sale.
Speaking at the annual forum of the Smart Card Alliance, Jamie Henry, director of payment services, Wal-Mart Stores says the supermarket chain rejects the idea of investing in 'band-aids' such as end-to-end encryption and tokenisation.
"Our position is let's just cut through this winding road and the rollout of all this expensive technology we're being asked to deploy, and let's get directly to the end result, which in our view as it currently stands is chip and PIN."
He says Wal-Mart already has 100% of its payment system hardware equipped to accept EMV chip and PIN, and is finalising the software programs for these devices.
"The PIN piece is very important to us. We don't see it being rolled out otherwise," he says.
Speaking at the same conference, Dodd Roberts, president and CEO of the Merchant Advisory Group, called on payment industry stakeholders to come together to set a direction toward EMV in the US that does not require multiple stages of investment in interim solutions.
US merchants are particularly concerned that international fraudsters will turn their attention to US shores as the EMV standard is rolled out in other markets.
Worldwide nearly one billion EMV cards have been issued, according to keynote speaker Brian Byrne, a Visa executive and the chair of the EMVCo board of managers.