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New study follows trends in use of EMV cards

The report reflects actual use for 'top of the wallet cards,' not for EMV cards that are issued only to lie forgotten in a desk drawer, CardFlight says.

December 16, 2015

The Payments Security Task Force predicts that 98 percent of U.S. credit and debit cards will contain EMV chips by the end of 2017. A new report, "CardFlight EMV Migration Tracker," shows progress toward this goal, but indicates that there's still a long way to go.

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For this report, mobile tech provider CardFlight gleaned data from hundreds of thousands of transactions processed through its gateway by merchants in all 50 U.S. states, according to a press release.

CardFlight Founder and CEO Derek Webster observed that the analysis reflects actual use for "top of the wallet cards," and not for cards that are issued only to lie forgotten in a desk drawer.

"Very little hard data has been published about the real world use of EMV chip card technology in the U.S.," Webster said in the release. "Most published statistics rely on surveys, individual anecdotes or forecasts rather than real transactional data."

Findings in "CardFlight EMV Migration Tracker" include:

• more than 50 percent of cards now in use have EMV chips;
• from October to November, the number of EMV-enabled cards grew by 5 percent;
• more than  83 percent of American Express cards have EMV chips, while Discover lags at 40 percent; and
• more than  63 percent of cards used in Hawaii have EMV chips, compared with just 11 percent in Mississippi.

The full report is available for free download.