What does EMV stand for?

EMV stands for Europay, Visa, and MasterCard. These three companies originally developed the chip technology, and it has now become an industry standard.

A computer chip inside credit and debit cards, known as EMV, is now used to make card transactions safer. It was created in the mid-1990s and has evolved into the standard for secure card payments. It is owned by major credit card companies, including Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Discover, JCB, and UnionPay, and managed by a body known as EMVCo

So how does EMV actually work?

EMV chips provide far better security than the magnetic stripes on cards, largely because they don't transmit the card number in a transaction. Instead, they generate a unique code for every transaction and send that code to the merchant's card reader. This is a radical departure from the practice for magnetic stripe transactions, where the card number is on the stripe and sent to the reader on every transaction.

The codes generated by EMV cards cannot be replicated, reused, or easily counterfeited thus, EMV cards are protected from many of the security vulnerabilities that plague magstripe transactions.