Issuers around the world are including chips in bank cards and merchants are moving to EMV-compliant point-of-sale (POS) terminals to increase security and reduce card-present fraud resulting from counterfeit, lost and stolen debit and credit cards.

Financial institutions in Europe, Latin America, Asia/Pacific, Canada and the United States are issuing contact or dual-interface EMV chip cards for credit card and debit card payment (commonly referred to as “chip and PIN”) or migrating to EMV issuance and acceptance. EMVCo publishes global statistics on EMV issuance and acceptance. EMVCo reported that over 3.4 billion EMV cards were in circulation globally at the end of 2014. EMVCo also reports the status of “chip-on-chip” transactions; one in three of all card-present transactions undertaken globally between June 2014 and June 2015 used EMV chip technology.

The U.S. is now migrating to EMV chip cards. The EMV Migration Forum is the cross-industry organization focused to address issues that require broad cooperation and coordination across many constituents in the payments space in order to successfully introduce secure EMV contact and contactless technology in the United States. As of the end of 2015, the Forum estimates that approximately 400 million EMV chip cards have been issued in the U.S., with 675,000 merchant locations accepting EMV chip transactions. The Forum has published a variety of resources to assist payments industry stakeholders with EMV migration. Resources are available on the EMV Connection website.

EMV is an open-standard set of specifications for smart card payments and acceptance devices. The EMV specifications were developed to define a set of requirements to ensure interoperability between chip-based payment cards and terminals. EMV chip cards contain embedded microprocessors that provide strong transaction security features and other application capabilities not possible with traditional magnetic stripe cards. Today, EMVCo manages, maintains and enhances the specifications. EMVCo is owned by American Express, China UnionPay, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, UnionPay, and Visa and includes other organizations from the payments industry participating as technical and business associates. Information on the specifications and organization is available at EMVCo.