New Research Finds Chip Card Adoption Rising

New research from First Annapolis finds that more than a year after the EMV fraud liability shift went into effect, EMV chip transactions are beginning to represent a meaningful percentage of overall debit transaction volume.  In the U.S., adoption among both issuers and merchants is still underway, but migration on both sides of the payments value chain is increasing.

Figure 1: Quarterly EMV Performance Metrics (2016 YTD)

First Annapolis began monitoring issuers’ EMV performance metrics in Q1 2016 as a supplement to their Debit Issuer Benchmarking Study.

Among the leading debit issuers tracked by First Annapolis:

• 63% of issuers’ debit cards are EMV-enabled, on average, as of Q3, up from 52% in Q1;
• Active EMV-cardholders performed an average of 26.8 debit transactions per month in Q3, of which 6.9 (26%) were chip-based transactions (chip-on-chip), up from 1.5 in Q1; and
• Chip transactions accounted for 18.1% of participating issuers’ total debit volume, up from 4.2% in Q1.

To learn more about First Annapolis’ research, click here.

*Active is defined as cards that have been used to perform at least one POS transaction in the past 30 days. Source: First Annapolis Consulting, Debit Issuer Benchmarking Study. Results reflect the unweighted sample average of data provided by 6 issuers, representing 50MM cards.