A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC) is any pocket-sized card with embedded integrated circuits. Smart cards can be either contact or contactless and can provide personal identification, authentication, data storage, and application processing. Smart cards may provide strong security authentication for single sign-on (SSO) within large organizations.
In the merchant services, or credit card processing industry, we typically use the phrase smart card to refer to EMV (Europay MasterCard Visa) compliant cards and equipment has been widely implemented globally except in a few countries such as the United States. In the US we have seen a drastic increase in the use of smart cards and a mandate for merchants. Read Does Your Business Need EMV (Smart Chip) Terminals?