Number of EMV-Enabled Cards Reaches All-Time High
Most cards across the globe are EMV-chip enabled, according to a report by EMVco.
According to the report, released yesterday, the number of EMV-chip enabled cards in global circulation increased by 1 billion in 2017. In that year, there were about 7.1 billion EMV-enabled cards in circulation, the report showed. This year there will likely be much more, the report states.
In yesterday’s release, Jack Pan, EMVCo executive committee chair, said:
Both EMV chip card issuance and EMV chip transactions surpassing 50% globally is testament to the increasing maturity of the worldwide infrastructure, and a significant milestone for the payments community. EMVCo continues to work closely with payment stakeholders to evolve the EMV Specifications to provide a secure, inter-operable foundation for emerging technologies across face-to-face and remote environments.
Earlier this week, Bank Innovation posted a report that showed 36% of Americans chose EMV chip cards as the preferred method of payment in physical stores.
EMV gets its name from the three initial developers Europay, Mastercard and Visa, who back in 1993 came together to develop the chip system in order to ensure more security for POS transactions. Later, the three developers were joined by other banks and card issuers including Discover, JCB, UnionPay and American Express.
The first EMV card was launched in 1994 in Europe (of course). In October 2015, there was push across the U.S. for merchants to accept EMV-chip enabled payments. This mechanism, which uses an extra layer of authentication through the chip, would prevent card cloning and other security risks in physical stores.
Today, according to the EMVco report, about 54.6% of cards globally are chip enabled. The report also shows that of all the card-present transactions around the world in 2017, 63.7% were chip enabled.
The chart below shows the EMV chip adoption rate across various regions.
If it’s surprising that the European market doesn’t have the highest adoption rate in 2017, that’s probably because most businesses either already have the technology, or the prevalence of digital payments in the region. The report doesn’t provide any explanation on this topic.
However, when it comes highest percentage of card-present transactions among all regions, Europe is the highest by far with 98.6%
