EMV is short for Europay, Mastercard and Visa: the three companies that created the EMV standard.

EMV cards store cardholder information on a metallic chip instead of in a magnetic stripe. These chips can only be authenticated by special readers, making them more secure than stripe-only cards.

A primary benefit of EMV chip technology is preventing counterfeit fraud. Once commonplace, counterfeit fraud — in which a cardholder's information is collected, stored and reprinted on a different card — has declined sharply since EMV chip technology began to appear.

According to Visa, counterfeit fraud dropped 76% between 2015 and 2018 among merchants who adopted EMV card readers.