Three months shy of the EMV liability shift’s one-year anniversary, issuers are making brisk progress but merchants are stuck at a
About 80% of U.S.-issued Mastercard credit cards in circulation are now equipped with an EMV chip, based on the latest data provided by MasterCard in an Aug. 3 press release. Mastercard projects its chip-card rollout will be completed sometime next year.
But merchant adoption of EMV is another story. Mastercard counts 1.7 million merchants actively processing EMV transactions, which is less than 30% of the U.S. marketplace.
At merchants that have enabled EMV, counterfeit card fraud has fallen sharply, according to Mastercard. The rate of counterfeit card fraud declined 60% at five of the largest merchants processing chip cards since the EMV liability shift went into effect Oct. 1, 2015, Mastercard said.
“The U.S. is one of the most complex markets [for EMV implementation] in the world and great progress has been made in securing our payments ecosystem in a short amount of time,” Chiro Aikat, Mastercard’s senior vice president of product delivery for EMV, said in the release.
Visa recently provided other figures documenting the progress of the U.S. EMV migration.
The total number of Visa chip cards in circulation as of June 30, 2016, was 326 million, up from 130% from 141.9 million in August 2015, Visa said.
Chip-card transactions account for more than 25% of all Visa payments volume, and counterfeit card fraud at chip-equipped merchants fell by 35% in March 2016 compared with the same period a year earlier, Visa said.
