In an effort to fight fraud, banks in the UK are rolling out a pilot program to defeat credit card cloning (where you make a copy of the credit card by duplicating the data on the back of the card) through the use of an electronic chip that verifies a PIN number.

According to this article from BBC News, American Express and other local banks in the UK are issuing the cards during the trial period and will roll them out across the country over the next 18 months and that they should be in common use by 2005.