London

ON a recent morning, eager shoppers swarmed around Covent Garden, a 350-year-old former open-air vegetable market in central London whose glass-fronted stores now include popular American companies such as Apple and Shake Shack.

But when consumers here pulled out a credit card to make a purchase, they got an extra layer of security compared with most shoppers in the US. A chip embedded into all credit and debit cards in Europe - a technology known as EMV - has cut many forms of card fraud by more than 65 per cent in the past decade.