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Mumbai, March 5 Skimming (trapping of card information stored on the magnetic strip of the card) might not be prevalent in India; however, this has not stopped banks from taking proactive measures to provide maximum security to their customers. Skimming is the theft of credit card information by either manually copying down numbers or using a magnetic stripe reader on a pocket-sized electronic device.

Axis Bank on Wednesday launched ‘Visa Platinum Credit Card’ based on the EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) standard with an embedded chip to store the cardholder’s information in encrypted format to provide security against possible misuse in the form of counterfeiting and skimming.

“Though frauds such as skimming are not widely prevalent in the Indian market, there is a possibility of it going up in the future,” said Mr Hemant Kaul, President, Retail Banking, Axis Bank.

EMV certified chip cards are payment cards carrying an embedded microchip. The chip in addition to the magnetic stripe on the card will offer new payment options and services, greater security and more convenience, said Mr Kaul. When a customer swipes his card at the point of sale terminal, the chip card sends a secret message to authenticate every transaction making it difficult for a fraudster to steal the information.

EMV-based chip card also ensures secure exchange of information between the card and bank’s authorisation system because of presence of cryptogram in the online requests and responses.

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