EMV is the global standard for chip-enabled payment cards originally developed by Europay, Mastercard, and Visa.
The acronym comes from the initials of those three companies, which collaborated on specifications for cards containing integrated circuits and compatible payment terminals. Europay later became part of Mastercard, but the EMV name remained in use.
EMV cards can support chip transactions that generate transaction-specific data, making many forms of counterfeit-card fraud more difficult than copying the information from a magnetic stripe. Depending on the country and transaction, a cardholder may verify a payment with a PIN, a signature, or no additional step.
EMV is not the same as contactless payment. Contactless cards often use EMV chip technology together with near-field communication, or NFC, to exchange data without inserting the card into a terminal.