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NAFCU President and CEO Dan Berger represented credit unions during a Payments Security Task Force steering committee meeting in New York City Thursday on a wide range of issues affecting the payments ecosystem.

The steering committee was focusing Thursday on payments security, EMV, cybersecurity, tokenization and encryption. In addition to Berger, participants included executives from large banks, retailers, payment processors and payment hardware and software companies. Chris McWilton, president of North America markets for MasterCard, and Ryan McInerney, president of Visa, participated along with executives from Marriott and McDonalds.

NAFCU is a member of the Payments Security Task Force, a diverse group that is focused on driving a discussion on payments system security.

This month, the task force reported that eight financial institutions representing about 50 percent of total U.S. payment card volume expect 63 percent of their credit and debit cards to contain EMV chips by the end of this year; that will grow to 98 percent by the end of 2017, they estimated.

The group also issued a payments security "roadmap" late last year that that echoes NAFCU's long-held view that no single measure, such as chip technology, is enough to ensure data security.

Berger, testifying last month before the House Small Business Committee, pushed Congress for legislation setting national data security standards for merchants similar to those applied to credit unions and other financial institutions under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. He said all segments of the payments system need to participate to ensure consumers' personal and financial data is as safe as possible.