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It is a major undertaking by any stretch of the imagination. No less than 770,000 tills in shops and businesses far and wide are now able to accept PIN-verified transactions. Even during its roll-out period the scheme was curtailing fraud, with a reported reduction of £36 million in counterfeit and ‘lost and stolen' fraud committed on plastic cards during the six-month period from January to June 2005 when compared with the same timeframe for the previous year.

Given that this is such a large-scale initiative in the fight against card fraud, the BSIA's CCTV Section believes that there is now a pressing requirement for guidelines on the installation and use of CCTV in the context of the successful operation of Chip and PIN. As a result, we are preparing a guidance document - to be published shortly - that will address the key issues.

These include the positioning of Chip and PIN terminals (both static and mobile), CCTV at the Point-of-Sale (particularly with regard to the location of fixed cameras), how those cameras used for transaction monitoring should be handled and the need for ensuring that the pre-set positions of moveable cameras are not going to capture a customer's PIN information.

In the event that CCTV systems are integrated with an EPOS system to record the CCTV data associated with a transaction, the guidance also highlights the fact that it's absolutely imperative PIN data be excluded.

The impact Chip and PIN is having on card fraud appears to be a positive one. It is vitally important, then, that the integrity of the Chip and PIN process be protected (and, in the context of CCTV Best Practice, is adopted both for the system installation and monitoring such that there is no potential for PIN details to be compromised).