After wrapping up the migration of over a million of its credit cards to the Europay MasterCard Visa (EMV) chip-enabled system mandated by the central bank, the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) would do the same to its debit cards.
Jenelyn Lacerna, vice president for credit cards, in a spot interview, said after the modernization of some 1.3 million credit cards, the lender’s debit cards were to follow to meet the deadline given by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) for this other migration of cards to a more secure system.
“On the debit side, we will be compliant until 2017. We’re already starting,” she said in Filipino.
The longest-running bank in the Philippines has already upgraded its automated teller machines (ATMs), which are now EMV-enabled. BPI currently has 2,100 ATMs situated nationwide.
According to Euromonitor International, there are over 35.36 million debit cards in circulation in the country.
The BSP previously gave the order for all ATM cards to be EMV-compliant. The system is considered the global standard for chip-based credit and debit transactions and believed more secure than the magnetic strip technology used in most bank-issued cards in the country.
All cards should be EMV-compliant by January 2017.
On security and the influx of fraud cases in the country, Lacerna said fraud will never be fully erased and that the best thing banks can do is look ahead and study fraud trends and patterns before suspects could act on unsuspecting clients.
She said that, in tandem with the Bankers Association of the Philippines, the entire industry is constantly finding ways to battle fraud.
“It’s a continuous effort. We have an entire department that tries to understand the behavior of the [suspects], to understand the behavior of the market today,” Lacerna said.
BPI is the fourth-largest bank in terms of assets in the country as of end-March this year, with a total resource base of P1.25 trillion and at least 810 branches across the archipelago.