EMVCo: 59 Percent of Card Present Transactions Use EMV Chips

Data from secure payments enabler EMVCo shows that 58.9 percent of card present transactions, measured globally, were EMV chip-enabled, the technical body said Wednesday.

That tally comes from card-present contact and contactless transactions that were monitored globally and spanned the period between July 2016 through June of this year.

EMVCo said the 58.9 percent EMV-enabled finding outpaces the prior year’s 42.4 percent rate.

One caveat, though, is that the adoption of EMV chip technology is ongoing, with real-time data likely to be higher than the reported June 2017 number.

“The most recent transaction volume data indicates that we are moving towards EMV chip technology becoming the foundation for contact and contactless card-present payments worldwide,” said Jack Pan, EMVCo executive community chair, in a statement.

Digging into the numbers a bit, the EMVCo data shows the U.S. as having seen the biggest jump year over year, with 31.4 percent of transactions reported as EMV-enabled and up from 7.2 percent last year.

Compared to the U.S., other regions have seen much higher adoption rates of EMV-enabled transactions, as the technology has been deployed there for significantly longer periods of time. According to the data, Europe has seen rates ranging from 89 percent to 98 percent, while the Middle East sports a 90.9 percent rate and Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean come in at 87 percent. Asia trailed those percentages at 56.2 percent.

In mid-year figures, EMVCo estimated that there were a total of 6.1 billion EMV cards in circulation worldwide as of the end of 2016. Data from June showed a 6.1 billion figure as an increase of approximately 1.3 billion cards over the previous 12 months.