EMV cardholder name is different to name on credit card for NFC scanned credit cards

Question

I've been playing around with androids NFC capabilities and scanning the data off of my credit cards

The card holder name I get from the card is in the form

Smith/John

Whereas the name on my physical card is like so

John Smith

Does anyone know if it's possible to grab the card holder name that's on the card? The one that's used to make online payments. Can the name with the slash be used in that form as well?

Answer 1

Both, the name that you read from the card and the name that's printed on the card are infact the same. The printed name is typically printed {FIRST NAME}{SPACE}{LAST NAME} whereas the card holder name field in the card's data structures (e.g. mag-stripe track data) is always encoded as {LAST NAME}/{FIRST NAME}. So to get the name printed on the card you can simply split the string at the "/" (slash) to get the first name and last name fields. You can then re-arrange those fields in whatever form you need.

Btw. note that all major brands committed to removing the name information from the data structures readable through the contactless interface. Thus, with future cards, reading the card holder's name through NFC will not be possible any more.