Building society banks on chip and PIN

Norwich and Peterborough Building Society (N&P) has kicked off the rollout of chip and PIN cards to replace magnetic strip debit cards for more than 100,000 account holders.

The building society began the rollout last month and so far has issued 3,000 cards.

N&P's head of banking and mortgage operations Paul Rippon told silicon.com that the building society has invested in the technology to reduce fraud. Another reason to act was the fact that other financial services company's were starting their own rollouts of the more secure chip and pin technology.

He said: "It can be the weakest link that is targeted [by fraudsters] and the society wasn't prepared to be that weakest link."

The rollout follows a trial of the technology with 130 customers and staff between May and July this year.

Rippon said: "The results of the trial were fantastic with several thousand successful transactions."

From 1 August all customers opening current accounts have been getting chip and PIN cards, as have customers replacing lost or stolen cards.

"We've got 105,000 debit cards [in circulation]," said Rippon, "so we've got some way to go before we see full implementation but we expect to get there by December 2006."

Rippon said early indications are that the cards will help cut fraud. And they are also helping the building society offer additional services.

N&P's rollout was implemented with transaction processing company Transaction Network Services, using Aconite's EMV Transaction Enabler and EMV Risk Manager technologies.

Rippon said that at the centre of success was getting all the interested parties talking: "It was a multi-site, multi-country project and that was one of the key points to get right - to make sure we had good communications between all these partners."

Although other financial services companies started their chip and PIN programmes earlier, Rippon said he wasn't worried about being left behind.

"We are certainly not concerned that we are going to be at the tail-end of the rollout. It wouldn't have been economic or sensible to be at the vanguard... We wanted to see a couple of other issuers roll out the cards and get feedback from the industry as a whole."

The new cards will allow customers to change their PINs at 30,000 ATMs around the country, something they couldn't previously do. "The benefit is our geographical reach expands," said Rippon.

N&P also looking at building additional services on top of the card infrastructure.