The EMV Integrated Circuit Card Specifications for Payment Systems are global payment industry specifications that describe the requirements for interoperability between chip based consumer payment applications and acceptance terminals2 to enable payment. The specifications are managed by the organisation EMVCo.
Named after the original organisations that created the specification, Europay, MasterCard and Visa, the EMV specifications were first published in 1996. Fourteen years later, there are now one billion active EMV chip cards used for credit and debit payment, at 15.4 million EMV acceptance terminals deployed around the world3.