[Johnie]

This is done via credit card tokenization. Tokenization is a major boom to the payment industry. However, there is a lot of complexity and moving pieces for all of this to work. But once it works, it'll unlock a lot of potential for startups to innovate in the payment industry.

http://www.emvco.com/specifications.aspx?id=263

[arfrank]

Curious to hear what innovations you see coming down the pipeline? The spec also discusses loyalty programs via tokenization, but no one has yet to implement them to my knowledge.

[Johnie]

PCI compliance is a high bar that has limited a lot of innovation in real world transactions. Merchants are still using POS and payment terminals that are a decade old. Merchants have been quite reluctant to change this as it has been expensive and does not add value to them to upgrade.

Due to EMV liability shift, tokenization, windows xp deprecation (as well as a number of other changes in the payment industry), merchants now have the catalyst to look at other solutions. This has opened the door for everything from POS to payment terminals to hand held registers. By lowering the bar of PCI compliance and risk, it opens up the sector to other devices and applications that do not need to meet the bars of payment compliance.