Norwich and Peterborough Building Society (N&P) has outsourced its CHIP and PIN communications needs to Transaction Network Services (UK) Ltd (TNS).
TNS is helping N&P to respond to the industry-wide drive to tackle credit and debit card fraud with the provision of fully EMV-compliant (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) card issuing and transaction services. TNS says outsourcing this process is a cost effective route for smaller card issuers, enabling them to benefit from existing technologies and processing expertise.
The first official N&P chip-enabled Visa debit card was issued on the 1st August 2005, following a successful three-month live trial of 130 cards and over 3,000 transactions. N&P will continue to migrate customers from magnetic strip to EMV-chip cards when new, replacement, lost or stolen cards are required and expects all debit card customers to be upgraded by the end of 2006.
“We need to ensure we continue to provide our customers with the latest in transaction security and efficiency,” says Paul Rippon, head of banking and mortgage operations at Norwich and Peterborough. “Working with TNS has given us the ability to balance risk and investment and meet the demand for faster and more secure EMV-compliant transactions.”
TNS organises the entire process for N&P from issuing the chip card, receiving the transaction from wherever the card is used, verifying the PIN, checking the status of the card itself and the status of the owners balance, and authorising the transaction.
As part of the service, TNS will handle both lost and stolen cards and can stop a card immediately after it is reported lost or stolen, by sending a message directly to the card’s chip to destroy it, rendering the card unusable. TNS also has the capability to develop the chip script engine enabling more functionality and possibilities for chip communication.