Chip-Enabled Merchants Reach 2.9M In U.S.

Visa announced that the growing number of chip cards and chip-enabled merchants has helped bring counterfeit fraud in the U.S. down by 76 percent.

“Visa set the path for the U.S. payments industry to begin the shift to EMV chip cards in 2011,” the company wrote in a press release. “One of the leading factors was that chip technology is extremely effective in reducing counterfeit fraud, which was the leading type of fraud in the U.S. at the time.”

More than 2.9 million merchant locations are now accepting chip-enabled cards — a 626 percent increase since the beginning of EMV migration in the U.S.

The company’s research shows that for merchants who have completed the chip upgrade, counterfeit fraud dollars dropped 76 percent in December 2017 compared to December 2015.

As of March 2018, there were 483.6 million Visa chip cards in the United States, compared to 159 million in September 2015 – a 203 percent increase. And 97 percent of overall U.S. payment volume in March was on EMV cards.

As for international research, in December 2017, data from secure payments enabler EMVCo showed that 58.9 percent of card present transactions were EMV chip-enabled. The data came from card-present contact and contactless transactions that were monitored globally, spanning the period between July 2016 through June of this year.

“The most recent transaction volume data indicates that we are moving toward EMV chip technology becoming the foundation for contact and contactless card-present payments worldwide,” said Jack Pan, EMVCo executive community chair.

The data shows the U.S. seeing the biggest jump year over year, with 31.4 percent of transactions reported as EMV-enabled, up from 7.2 percent last year.

However, compared to the U.S., other regions have seen much higher adoption rates of EMV-enabled transactions, as the technology has been around longer in those areas. Europe has seen rates ranging from 89 percent to 98 percent, while the Middle East has a 90.9 percent rate. Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean come in at 87 percent. Asia trailed those percentages at 56.2 percent.