After an Unsteady Start, Debit EMV Shows Steady Progress, a New Report Indicates

When it comes to the U.S. EMV conversion, it seems as if everything has proceeded more slowly than anyone had expected. Merchants have been slow to adopt the chip technology, EMV certifications have been slow in coming, and consumers and merchants alike have even complained about slow transactions. But now, more than 14 months after the conversion started in earnest, there’s evidence EMV has finally begun to register on the payments meter.

“EMV chip transactions are beginning to represent a meaningful percentage of overall debit transaction volume,” says a blog post about a report from First Annapolis Consulting, an Annapolis, Md.-based payments consultancy.

The firm’s Debit Issuer Benchmarking Study, which looked at results for six issuers representing 50 million debit cards, found that 63.4% of the cards were chip-enabled as of the end of the third quarter, up from 52.3% six months earlier. Each EMV card was performing nearly seven chip-on-chip transactions per month by the end of September, up from 1.5 transactions at the end of March. Chip-on-chip transactions occur when chip cards perform a transaction in a chip-enabled terminal.

And chip transactions as a fraction of the issuers’ total debit volume came to 18.1%, more than quadrupling the 4.2% registered in the first quarter.

These results were sufficient to spark optimism about the progress of EMV, at least for debit cards, among the authors of the study, First Annapolis senior manager Melissa Fox and Chris Razzano, senior analyst. “While EMV adoption still has a ways to go, particularly on the merchant side, EMV technology is now mainstream, and chip transactions have become an increasingly common consumer experience,” they say in the blog post.