MasterCard and Visa agreed to a deal for easing of mag-stripe to EMV migration. EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is a global standard for operations for authenticating credit and debit card transactions. In this way, the deal allowed the two companies to share the usage of their respective common US debit technologies. 

Visa and MasterCard, along with Discover and American Express, laid out the EMV migration roadmap in the country. This included switching liability to retailers which would not be upgraded by October 2015. If pushed through, this would make possible routing of a debit chip transaction from one application to another merchant.

"By providing every US debit network with an efficient, market-ready answer, we are delivering a proven solution that not only preserves merchant routing choice, but ensures seamless interoperability with all other EMV programs across the globe," Chris McWilton, president, North America, MasterCard said.

"Importantly, this solution allows merchants and acquirers to deploy payment terminals using existing chip technologies that are already widely integrated into existing chip card acceptance solutions," Elizabeth Buse, global executive, Solutions, Visa, added.