SINGAPORE banks are rolling out a slew of measures to make card payment transactions more secure.

By April next year, all credit, debit and prepaid cards will be embedded with EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa standard) microprocessor chips that 'virtually eliminates the ability to copy the contents of the chip to another card', said the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) on Friday.

New activation procedures for cards will come into force by the second quarter of this year. Some banks will notify customers via SMS or email when cards are used for the first time. Others will require customers to activate the card via the bank's interactive voice response (IVR) systems or through ATMs.

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