BOSTON – Efforts by Visa and MasterCard to fight fraud will likely provide the institutional push to make U.S. credit unions and other financial institutions adopt so-called smart card technology more widely. Charles Walton, senior vice president of Caradas, Inc, a card consultancy firm based in Braintree, Massachusetts, told an audience at NAFCU's annual conference that "increasingly sophisticated" attacks on magnetic stripe cards overseas had already led VISA and MasterCard to adopt a single standard for smart cards outside the U.S. The two big card associations have begun driving the adoption of that technology by announcing that past a certain date, likely in 2005, magnetic striped card transactions will no longer be covered by the associations' loss policies, he explained. VISA used a similar approach to push the adoption of its Verified By Visa anti-fraud program for Internet transactions.