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The titanic mathematics of Visa EMV issuance

May 29, 2013

In a recent post on its Visa Viewpoints blog, the payments technology giant said that Visa EMV cards have been issued to U.S. cardholders at the rate of 5,000 per day since the company's August 2011 roadmap announcement. As of March 31, the total number of Visa chip cards in the market was 3.5 million and growing.

"With each new card, the U.S. payments ecosystem gets one step closer to achieving the improved security that EMV technology affords to consumers, merchants and issuers," wrote Stephanie Ericksen, head of authentication product integration at Visa Inc.

Ericksen goes on to say that, "[W]hile 3.5 million cards represent a strong start, we know that there is still work to do before the U.S. is fully migrated to EMV." 

She's got that right; 3.5 million cards is a lot of changed-out plastic. But put in context with the total number of Visa and credit and debit cards circulating in the U.S. today — somewhere north of 716 million as of Dec. 31, 2012, by Visa's count — it's clearly a long, long slog until Visa EMV is "everywhere you want to be."

If the U.S. is to make Visa's goal of going entirely EMV by Oct. 1, 2017, the rate of issuance will have to pick up dramatically. At the current rate of 5,000 replacements a day, it'll be roughly 142,500 days until every last Visa mag stripe card (712.5 million to go) gets an EMV upgrade.

That works out to about 28.5 years from now, sometime around the end of 2041, and nearly a quarter-century off pace. To make the Visa date, exactly 1589 days hence, card issuance will have to step up to 448,395 per day — almost 90 times the current rate. Starting today.

Read more about EMV.