Visa Australia announced it was moving to chip and PIN technology for all of its credit cards, with signature transactions to be banned by April 2013.

Visa's move to kill signature-based mag-stripe transactions by 2013 will require financial institutions and retailers to upgrade over 14 million visa cards, half a million point of sale terminals, and thousands of ATMs.

While fraud in Australia remains low by world standards, this aggressive rollout of new technologies will strengthen security reducing counterfeit, skimming and online card fraud. 

Is the U.S. next?