In concert with the release of new data indicating 40% of all payment cards and 71% of terminals worldwide now support the EMV standard, EMVCo LLC, the organization managing the EMV specifications, on May 20 released a new guide to help expand adoption of the chip-and-PIN technology.
Some 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, United Kingdom-based EMVCo said in a release.
EMV technology provides an extra layer of security against card-skimming fraud by requiring cardholders to enter a PIN at the point of sale to authenticate transactions. The card networks have waived the PIN requirements 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 says.
The organization’s new guide to EMV includes information on its collaboration with the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council and the International Organization of Standardization, along with implementation guidelines for issuers, acquirers and merchants.
The U.S. remains the only major worldwide payments market with no measurable chip-and-PIN card penetration, although a few U.S. banks recently announced plans issue EMV cards primarily to customers traveling overseas for their convenience (
The U.S. 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, 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 tells PaymentsSource. But industry experts increasingly are challenging this view, he says.
“There is a fear that the U.S. could become a center for fraud as most other countries increase their deployment of EMV technology,” Diaz says.
American Express Co., JCB, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc. oversee EMVCo, which formed in February 1999 to manage the EMV standard.
