WASHINGTON — A panel of executives from regulators, card issuers and retailers roundly endorsed using cards with embedded chips as a primary means of combating fraud and cutting fraud protection costs.

The panel told attendees Wednesday at Visa's Global Security Summit that other nations have uniformly found so called chip-and-PIN technology a marked improvement over card technology that relies on strips of magnetic tape to carry authentication data.

Stephen Fedor, senior director of Loss Prevention and Investigations for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, recounted how his bank, which issues both chip-and-PIN and magnetic stripe cards, had begun to have magnetic card holders traveling in Europe report not being able to make purchases at all in growing numbers of European retailers.