Industry projects
The UK Cards Association inherits from the APACS Card Payments Group a tradition of managing high profile, pioneering industry-wide projects.
The UK Cards Association will continue to lead innovative projects that keep the UK at the forefront of card payments globally. We support and encourage the establishment of new payment card services that better meet member and stakeholder requirements and look to facilitate co-operative innovation between our members.
The largest and most visible example of driving innovation across the card payments industry has been with the introduction of chip and PIN. APACS Card Payments Group and its members were instrumental in the development of this standard, and making the UK was the first country in the world to complete the rollout of this global chip and PIN system. Chip and PIN is the biggest consumer change programme seen in the UK since, or including, decimalisation and is part of a wider global programme to tackle increasing levels of plastic card fraud. It has proven to be an undoubted success in reducing particular areas of card fraud:
- Losses on face-to-face transactions on the UK high street were reduced by 29% from £98.5m in 2008 to £72.1m in 2009
- Fraud on lost and stolen cards (£47.9m) and mail non-receipt fraud (£6.9m) are now at their lowest levels for 10 years.
- UK cash machine fraud has decreased by 20% from £45.7m in 2008 to £36.7m in 2009
Whether it is technologies such as contactless cards, token based authentication or NFC handsets; we will continue to drive the implementation of these new developments as appropriate.
