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finance & strategy
EMV Rollout:
A Strong Head of Steam
By Thad Rueter, Senior Editor
The ongoing rollout of
EMV chip cards in the U.S. plays out smoothly, if a
bit confusingly, at a busy Walgreens store on the northwest side of Chicago. There, many shoppers still swipe their magnetic- stripe cards at payment terminals. But with every trip you notice more consumers—either on their own
or after politely being nudged by cashiers—inserting the chip end
of their relatively new cards into the terminals, waiting for the beep that tells them the machine has read the needed data and the cards now can be removed.
In those checkout lines come a few mumbled complaints from consum- ers about the new habit they must learn—muscle memory has them swiping before inserting, even after a few months of owning chip cards —but often the process involves shrugs and gentle guidance from the Walgreens clerks, some of whom amusingly wonder if, by the time shoppers get into the full EMV habit, the vanguard among them might then be moving on to forms of payment anchored not around chip cards but mobile phones.
The scene here provides a snap- shot of the EMV rollout in the U.S., a process kicked into higher gear
last October when liability for fraud stemming from card-present, POS transactions shifted to merchants that had not yet installed EMV- compliant terminals. The U.S. be- came one of the last global markets to adopt the anti-fraud standard, long familiar to travelers to Europe and Asia. While experts say certain retail niches still lag behind in embracing EMV here, the early gures behind the rollout show progress toward the goal of reduc- ing card-present fraud in the U.S.
Growing Acceptance
MasterCard data show that 54 percent of U.S. consumers report
having at least one chip card. That compares with 3 percent in 2014. Of those consumers with EMV chip cards, 30 percent report using those cards more often than the others in their wallets, the pay- ments network says.
Rival Visa reports similar growth in EMV. As of Nov. 30, 2015, nancial institutions had issued 195.4 million Visa-branded EMV chip cards in the U.S., an increase of some 580 per- cent over the previous 12 months, according to the payments network. The volume of transactions con- ducted with those cards increased to about $12.1 billion in November