There were 326.8m chip cards in the US as of the end of June 2016, exceeding the number of people who live in the country, Visa has reported. “The US added more than 100,000 chip-enabled merchant locations in June, bringing the total to 1.3m, or about 28% of the total merchant population,” the payment network says. “More than three-quarters of those chip-ready locations are small and medium-sized businesses. In June, one in four dollars spent in-store on a Visa card was spent with a chip card in a chip terminal.” The number of Visa chip payment transactions hit 483m in June.
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The problem is not the number of EMV cards but the number of magnetic stripe cards. All of those 327M chip cards also have the credit card number in the clear on a magnetic stripe. One waits in growing impatience for Visa and Mastercard to announce a plan to eliminate the magnetic stripe.