MasterCard Says EMV on Two-Thirds of Its Credit Cards And Accepted at 1.2 Million Locations

Six months after the U.S. payment card industry adopted EMV chip card transactions as the preferred card technology, MasterCard Inc. says 67% of U.S.-issued consumer credit cards bearing its mark have chips, and 1.2 million U.S. merchant locations now accept the card. The data comes six months after the Oct. 1 liability-shift deadline by which merchants had to be prepared to accept EMV chip cards to avoid assuming responsibility for counterfeit card fraud.

“We’ve had good progress,” Catherine Murchie, senior vice president of North American enterprise security solutions, tells Digital Transactions News. MasterCard would not provide a total number of U.S. chip cards. In September, MasterCard said 40% of its consumer credit cards had a chip.

At the end of 2015, MasterCard said it had 192 million credit cards and 185 million debit cards, figures that include magnetic-stripe only cards.

Murchie would not say how many EMV debit cards have been issued or how much that’s changed since Oct. 1. Though she says debit issuing is picking up, it is generally thought to lag EMV credit issuing because of issues surrounding compliance with the Durbin Amendment that mandates network routing choice for debit transactions. The EMV spec—designed originally for a single debit network—had to be tweaked to accommodate the mandate.

MasterCard’s tally of 1.2 million EMV-accepting merchant locations represents those that have turned on and actively accept EMV transactions, Murchie says. That is a significant increase from the 350,000 locations MasterCard announced last fall. Approximately 1 million are local or regional merchants. Estimates peg the number of payment-card accepting U.S. merchants at approximately 8 million. On this assumption, the current proportion of chip-accepting U.S. merchants is 15%.

That should not be confused with other estimates that peg the percentage at higher levels. In February, payments consultancy The Strawhecker Group said 37% of merchants were EMV-ready, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they actively accept chip card payments, says Jared Drieling, business intelligence manager at Omaha, Neb.-based Strawhecker.

Overall, the migration to chip cards is progressing well, Murchie says. “People are starting to have enough of an experience now,” she says. “There is an awareness.”

For example, some merchants that have not yet activated their EMV terminals have placed cards in the EMV reader notifying consumers they should swipe their cards or use a mobile-payment method, if available. That signals that consumers are asking about using their chip cards, Murchie says.