Nearly All of Visa’s Payment Volume Now Comes From Chip Cards, the Network Reports

Some 97% of Visa Inc.’s total U.S. payment volume stemmed from EMV chip cards in March, according to the card network’s latest periodic report on EMV’s progress in the United States. EMV volume totaled $70.7 billion, up from $4.8 billion in September 2015, the last full month before the country officially began converting to EMV. Chip transactions in March came to 1.5 billion, up from 79 million in September 2015.

Visa is also reporting that counterfeit fraud at merchants that had installed EMV fell 76% in the two years between December 2015 and December 2017. The report does not give actual dollar totals for counterfeit fraud, a scourge that the card networks cited early on as a principal part of the business case for replacing mag-stripe cards with EMV plastic. A total of 2.9 million U.S. merchants, or 63% of the total, were accepting EMV as of March, up from 392,000 in September 2015, according to Visa’s figures.

As for the cards themselves, there were 483.6 million Visa chip cards in circulation in March, triple the number counted two-and-a-half years earlier. That March total represents two-thirds of Visa’s U.S. cards, and breaks down to 202 million credit cards and 281.6 million debit cards.