Mastercard Spills The Latest EMV Data

Today, Mastercard announced that 80 percent of its U.S. consumer credit cards are now enabled with chips, marking an 88 percent increase in chip card adoption since the Oct. 1, 2015 EMV liability shift.

The company also reported that, in its network, there are now 1.7 million chip-active merchant locations, which make up approximately 30 percent of the total merchant population in the U.S. The numbers show a 374 percent spike in chip terminal adoption among Mastercard network merchants since last October.

“Mastercard has helped over 150 countries adopt EMV, and time and again, we’ve seen the same result: significant reductions in counterfeit card fraud,” Chiro Aikat, SVP of product delivery for EMV at Mastercard, said in a press release. “The U.S. is one of the most complex markets in the world, and great progress has been made in securing our payments ecosystem in a short amount of time. It’s rewarding for the industry to start seeing signs that merchants, issuers and consumers can be freed from the burdens of card fraud.”

According to Mastercard, among the company’s top five EMV-enabled merchants, counterfeit fraud in terms of U.S. dollars has dropped by over 60 percent.

Though EMV adoption is on the move, Mastercard announced earlier this year that it will work with other payments networks, acquirers and processors on a standard to get transaction times moving faster, with the core of those efforts rooted in the company’s recently announced M/Chip Fast solution.

Back in April, Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise security solutions for Mastercard, said the M/Chip Fast solution allows a consumer to dip an EMV chip card into the terminal and replicate what happens with a magnetic stripe transaction. He explained that M/Chip Fast is actually a fairly consistent EMV transaction that Mastercard does globally; the only thing that is different is changing the process flow so that the card authentication happens in just one step instead of two, allowing for the consumer to remove the card before the transaction is completed. Consumers, Bhalla said, can “take care of the transaction in seconds.”

Through its efforts to continue to accelerate EMV checkout times by driving collaboration across the industry, Mastercard confirmed there are already merchants putting the M/Chip Fast solution to work.