All new Visa credit cards to be Chip and Pin in Australia

Credit card giant Visa has announced that as of January of next year all new credit cards issued in Australia will be Chip and Pin, with the company planning to phase out signature plastic altogether by 2013.
It has been announced by the credit card giant Visa that from January of next year all new credit cards issued in Australia will be Chip and Pin cards. The company has also announced that it plans to migrate all plastic cards to Chip and Pin by 2013 in a bid to try and reduce credit card fraud in the country.

Visa has set deadlines to meet different goals in order to ensure that all plastic cards are Chip and Pin cards by April of 2013. From January all new credit cards will be Chip and Pin cards, and from early 2011 debit cards and pre-paid plastic cards will be updated. By April of 2012 Merchant POS terminals across Australia will need to accept Chip and Pin cards, and ATM machines are to be updated in 2011.
If all this goes to plan around fourteen million plastic cards, thousands of ATM machines, and half a million POS payment terminals will have migrated in order to phase out signature plastic and reduce fraud through Chip and Pin payments.
Officials believe that migrating credit cards and other plastic cards from signature cards to Chip and Pin cards will help to reduce credit card fraud levels, and this method has proven successful in other countries in terms of some transactions. However, Chip and Pin has led to increased CNP or Card Not Present credit card crime, where the card does not actually have to be present for the transaction to be carried out, such as with online, telephone, and mail order transactions.
Source - Finextra