Forty percent of all payment cards and 71% of terminals worldwide now support the EMV Integrated Circuit Card Specifications, EMVCo LLC, the organization managing the EMV specifications, said.
Roughly 1.2 billion payment cards based on the EMV standard were in circulation worldwide at the end of March, and 18.7 million payment terminals were equipped to accept them, the U.K. company said May 20.
EMV technology provides an extra layer of security against card fraud by allowing merchants to validate a PIN against a chip built into the card. The card networks have waived the PIN requirement for very small contactless transactions, however.
Europe accounts for 673 million chip-and-PIN cards, followed by the Asia-Pacific region at 336.6 million; Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean at 207.7 million; and Africa and the Middle East at 23 million, EMVCo said.
The U.S. remains the only major payments market with no measurable chip-and-PIN card penetration, although a few U.S. banks have announced plans issue EMV cards primarily to customers traveling overseas for their convenience.
The United States continues to resist adopting EMV because the region has relatively low fraud rates. Moreover, issuers and merchants have balked at paying the hefty price to reissue cards and deploy updated terminals, according to Jose Diaz, director of technical and strategic business development for Thales e-Security Inc.
"The perception is that the cost of an EMV solution is greater than the size of the problem," Diaz said. But industry experts increasingly are challenging this view, he said.
