The United States did not choose to implement EMV while Europe, Canada, Latin America, and Asia are in various stages of EMV chip migration. The U.S. has historically had relatively low fraud rates, due to nearly 100 percent online authorization and sophisticated real-time fraud detection by the issuer authorization systems. In addition, substantial costs are associated with the deployment of an EMV infrastructure. Chip cards are more expensive than magnetic stripe cards, POS terminals require additional features to read the card, and legacy back-office systems must be upgraded. Without a perceived fraud problem and given the cost of implementation, U.S. financial institutions and merchants did not make the investment required to convert the legacy bank card issuance and acceptance infrastructure to the EMV standard. Today, however, several factors are driving the U.S. payments industry to reconsider implementation and deployment of EMV for payments. Most important are the increasing amount of card-related fraud losses and the cost of enhancing security features incrementally. In addition, the investment being made by merchants to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and by the industry to implement new capabilities for contactless and NFC mobile payment transactions provides an opportunity to move to EMV in the U.S. Moreover, U.S. travellers abroad are discovering that their magnetic stripe bank cards are sometimes rejected. Finally, as other markets have adopted chip cards, the per-unit costs for cards and devices have decreased. Some POS device manufacturers now sell only hybrid devices with both chip and magnetic stripe capabilities. U.S. payments industry stakeholders recognize that there is a need to educate themselves about EMV and to leverage the lessons learned in other parts of the world. When compared to other regions, the U.S. market has unique characteristics, such as low cost telecommunications and the presence of contactless chip cards. Industry stakeholders are exploring which implementation options in the EMV specification will be required to meet U.S. market needs in the most cost-effective manner. The Smart Card Alliance Payments Council developed a white paper to educate stakeholders across the payments value chain about the critical aspects of deploying an EMV solution in their business environments in the U.S. To the White Paper www.smartcardalliance.org