9F44

Application Currency Exponent completes the pairing already seen repeatedly in this dictionary between a currency code and its decimal-places figure, applied here to the Application Currency Code (9F42, referenced alongside it, already covered): it states how many decimal places amounts expressed in the account's own currency actually use. Structurally it's the card-side, single-currency equivalent of the terminal's own Transaction Currency Exponent (5F36) - one pins down the decimal convention for the account's operating currency, the other for whatever currency the current transaction happens to be in, and the two only need to be compared, not reconciled, in a currency-conversion scenario. Because this is exactly the kind of small pairing field that gets overlooked in favour of its more prominent sibling (9F42), the failure mode is the same one already described for 9F43: a currency-conversion routine that reads 9F42 correctly but 9F44 incorrectly will compute a technically-run but numerically wrong conversion, off by a power of ten, with nothing else in the transaction signalling that this specific field is where the error originated. See EMV 4.4 Book 3.