The advent of EMV (the acronym stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa but refers to chip-equipped credit cards) is just around the corner. All credit card accepting merchants, except for gas stations, must be prepared to accept EMV cards by October, 2015. Gas/fuel merchants have until 2017 to be EMV compliant. There are pros and cons to this new technology, which obsoletes swipe (magnetic stripe) credit and debit cards. It also obsoletes the familiar swipe card readers found at every retailer and ATM in the United States.

Most of the world, including Canada, the European Union countries, India, Brazil and Japan, have converted to EMV. The push to implement EMV in the United States is to eliminate counterfeit credit cards and stolen PIN numbers that give thieves unauthorized access to individual’s credit card accounts.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice in 2013, more than 11 million Americans are victims of identity theft each year, and each instance costs the consumer $5,000. Of these 11 million identity thefts each year, seven million people are victims of credit card theft. The other four million experience bank account or personal information privacy violations.

While the pro-EMV experts tout EMV as a cure-all for credit card fraud, that’s true only to a point. Yes, EMV would effectively stop credit card misuse in card present point of sale (POS) transactions as it prevents the counterfeiting of the actual cards. The missing caveat is that EMV cannot stop card-not-present transactions, such as online purchases. So, online or in-person POS card-not-present transactions are still unprotected after implementation of EMV if no other security measures are added.

Security experts familiar with the infamous Target data breach maintain that EMV would not have protected the 40 million cardholders and 70 million customer records. However, EMV is part of the answer to fully securing credit and debit card transactions.

What is needed, at Target and every other POS, is full encryption of the transaction process from the card reader to merchant approval. Implementing full encryption and tokenization will have to wait until the credit card companies, Visa, MasterCard and Discover make it happen. EMV helps as would tokenization – an electronic swap process replacing the consumer’s credit card information with a short-duration token when the card is swiped.

EMV will go a long way to securing data privacy and preventing credit card fraud. However, more measures are needed to completely lock up all consumer’s data for card present and card-not-present transactions so we can all rest easier.