"At Scotiabank, our first objective is to provide customers with the best value for the financial products and services we offer," said Robin Hibberd, Executive Vice-President, Personal Lending and Insurance, Scotiabank. "Scotiabank is confident the new cards - with their proven ability to make an already secure payment system even more secure - will provide a solid backbone for our continued high levels of customer satisfaction and commitment."

A chip card is a credit or debit card containing an embedded computer chip, with the ability to store and process data. All chip cards used in the Kitchener-Waterloo trial will require personal identification numbers (PINs) for added security. EMV technology is named after the co-developers of the global chip card standard, Europay, MasterCard and VISA.

A Canadian leader in EMV innovations, Scotiabank introduced the country's first chip-and-PIN VISA cards in the Bank's successful pilot project in Barrie, Ontario, in 2003. About 15,000 chip-enabled Scotiabank VISA cards from that pilot are still active in Barrie, conducting domestic and international transactions.

"Scotiabank is pleased to extend our successes with chip card technology to the Canadian payment industry trial in Kitchener-Waterloo," said Jennifer Young, District Vice-President, Ontario Central West District, Scotiabank. "Our Barrie customers have benefited from greater convenience and added security for some time now and Scotiabank looks forward to bringing these gains to a larger client base."

Scotiabank's participation in the Canadian payment industry's trial of EMV chip technology - announced in October - will involve the phased roll out of some 75,000 chip-and-PIN card products - both debit and credit - in Kitchener-Waterloo. A national launch is planned later in 2008.

Other members of the Canadian payments industry - including Interac, MasterCard and Visa - are also migrating to chip-enabled debit and credit cards, automated banking machines (ABMs) and merchant point of sale terminals, as part of the Kitchener-Waterloo trial. The trial will test the interoperability of payment industry cards and devices, customer communication and adoption in a secure and controlled manner.