Government and the private sector don’t always see eye to eye, but we’re working together on an issue of great importance to Californians and all Americans: making credit card purchases safer. One crucial sector of the business community, however, has yet to fully buy in.

While retailers are leading the transition to more-secure “chip and PIN” payment cards, banks and credit unions continue to provide their customers with outdated, riskier technology.

The path to a safer “electronic payments ecosystem” starts with trading away the outdated magnetic stripe cards — which far too many Americans are stuck with — in favor of “chip and PIN” cards that have proved to be far safer. Using embedded chips instead of the old-fashioned stripe makes the card much more difficult to counterfeit. Entering a personal identification number as an additional security step was shown in a Federal Reserve study to make debit card transactions safer by up to 700 percent.

In many countries around the world — including nearly every G-20 nation except the U.S. — chip and PIN cards are already the predominant form of payment. This is because their safety record is demonstrable. Card fraud is down 67 percent in the United Kingdom alone.

In October, the President Barack Obama took a major step toward increased chip and PIN use in the United States by launching the BuySecure Initiative, a plan to combat cyberattacks targeting consumer data that involves adoption of chip and PIN cards by the federal government.

He praised the American retailers who are installing chip and PIN card-reading technology in their stores and called for “every retailer, every bank and every credit card company” to join the effort.

Banks, along with credit unions, have been reluctant to embrace chip and PIN technology, but some progress is being made. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that financial institutions will be updating more than half a billion payment cards this year. But while these new cards will contain chips, they will not require the use of PINs. This deprives the cards of the 700 percent boost in transaction safety identified by the Federal Reserve, which is akin to deploying them into the battle against fraudsters without full armament.

Credit unions have proved more resistant. Their lobbyists in Washington, D.C., have emerged as some of the loudest voices opposing chip and PIN. Support for the shift exists, however, even within their own ranks. An executive at the United Nations Federal Credit Union told The Wall Street Journal that his industry “should be doing the most we can to fight fraud, and the only way to send that message is to stand clearly behind chip and PIN.”

Hopefully internal pressure, along with external support for retailers and the prodding by Obama can convince banks and credit unions that our payment card future is more secure with chip and PIN. The retail and financial sectors can and should work together, and the White House BuySecure initiative shows that government can be a worthy partner as well. This kind of collaboration is exactly what we need to make every American card transaction as secure as possible.

And if issuers don’t provide more-secure chip and PIN cards, then customers should vote with their feet and take their business to an institution that will offer them the more-secure technology.

Bill Dombrowski is the president and CEO of the California Retailers Association. He wrote this for this newspaper.