Chip and PIN migration slow as EMV deadline approaches

A major deadline for EMV card adoption is just one month away. Can chip-and-PIN and chip-and-signature technology improve payment card security and reduce fraud?

September 10, 2015 by Olivia Eckerson, TechTarget

Adoption of chip-and-PIN and chip-and-signature technology — also known as EMV — remains slow among U.S. retailers despite a major EMV deadline just one month away.

The recent deployment of EMV (Europay, MasterCard Visa) credit cards in the United States marked an important step in the effort to curb payment card fraud. The common magnetic stripe cards still used in U.S. payment cards are decades-old technology and a primary target for cybercriminals. The cardholder’s data can be easily copied and re-encoded onto another card with a magnetic stripe. EMV chip-based cards, however, are designed to be more secure because they compose a one-time encrypted code for each transaction. Major retailers, such as Target, have recently upgraded their point-of-sale systems to accept EMV-enabled cards.

Still, adoption of EMV in the U.S. lags far behind other countries. According to EMVCo LLC, a global consortium devoted to EMV development and implementation, the adoption rate of EMV by U.S. businesses at the end of 2014 was just 7.4% — compared to 83.5% in Europe Zone 1 countries and 59.5% in Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition, just 0.12% of credit card transactions in the U.S. were EMV chip-based last year, according to EMVCo.