A dozen or so years ago, a real revolution began in our country, as our domestic banks offered us the first ATM cards, with which customers could withdraw money from the few ATMs available at the time. We first made payments with debit cards, but credit cards also appeared on our market shortly thereafter. This payment revolution, which took place in our country at the beginning of the 1990s, had its world premiere in the United States and many Western European countries as early as the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. The first payment and ATM cards were cards with so-called magnetic stripe technology, on which information about our card and the corresponding bank account, as well as our PIN code, is stored. Looking back in time and knowing the capabilities of today’s microprocessor cards, the functionality of the application stored on a magnetic stripe is very limited.
Polish premiere
The first chip cards appeared on the banking market as early as the 1980s, but it was only the rapid development of telecommunications networks in the early 1990s that led to the creation of a research team, which was formed jointly by the three largest payment organizations: EuroCard/MasterCard and VISA. These actions led to the creation of the microprocessor card standard – EMV (the name comes from the first letters of the names of these three organizations). A card compliant with the EMV standard is a smart card that has been equipped with a microprocessor, and also – depending on the version, each card can be equipped with memory of varying capacity. Thus, we can basically divide smart cards into cards with a microprocessor (smart cards) and cards with memory (memory cards). Strictly memory cards are not widely used in banking, as their capabilities are not much greater than those of magnetic stripe cards, and they are used as pre-paid telephone cards or access control cards. So it is not the built-in memory, but the microprocessor that largely determines the intelligence of a modern card. Chip cards thus become a kind of small computer that we can hide in the smallest pocket, and the capabilities of this card depend mainly on the applications installed on it, so our payment card can already serve as an electronic purse today, with which we can pay, for example, for a public transport ticket.
The article comes from the magazine “e-Fakty” 5/2005.