Official figures released by the global technical body EMVCo* demonstrate increasing adoption of EMV chip technology. There are now 2.37 billion EMV payment cards in circulation and 36.9 million EMV terminals active worldwide.

The latest figures, which reflect data from Q4 2013, are the first to be released by EMVCo since welcoming Discover and UnionPay as new member-owners in 2013, and are based on a compilation of data submitted by each member financial institution. The figures currently exclude the US, which is in the process of migrating its payment infrastructure to EMV chip technology.

* EMVCo – which is owned by American Express, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, UnionPay and Visa – facilitates worldwide interoperability and acceptance of secure payment transactions by managing and evolving the EMV Specifications and related testing processes.

---

CTMfile take: EMV chip and pin cards will eventually be adopted in every major country world-wide and in all the main travel suppliers, e.g. air, rail, hotels, etc. This is why BofA Merrill recently extended chips and pin in the US to their purchase cards and travel cards. What unnecessary fraud are you incurring (fraud is significantly less on chip & pin cards than on magnetic stripe only), and what business are you loosing by not accepting chip and pin cards?