MasterCard Collaboration To Accelerate EMV Rollout

EMV adoption is on the move.

The acceptance and usage of chip technology by consumers and merchants is on the rise, and MasterCard has the data to back it up. Nearly 68 percent of all U.S.-issued, MasterCard-branded consumer credit cards are chip-enabled as of April 2016, and the number of chip-active merchant locations has increased to 1.2 million.

Though adoption is up, consumers and merchants alike are still grousing over slower transaction times.

MasterCard wants to change that and, today (May 26), has announced its efforts to continue to accelerate EMV checkout times by driving collaboration across the industry.

MasterCard announced that it’s working with other payments networks, acquirers and processors on a standard to get transaction times moving faster, with the core of those efforts rooted in the company’s recently announced M/Chip Fast solution. MasterCard isn’t licensing its technology but rather working collaboratively to make its solution’s attributes available to any entity, including other brands.

In an interview with Karen Webster last month, Ajay Bhalla, President of Enterprise Security Solutions for MasterCard, said M/Chip Fast is intended to shave precious seconds off the current EMV transaction time for those merchants feeling the brunt of frustrated consumers, jammed-up lines and what seems like painstakingly long transactions.

M/Chip Fast brings the principles (and speed) of contactless or “tap-and-go” technology to EMV transactions, enabling shoppers to get through checkout lines at a much faster rate.

“The whole point of EMV is to reduce counterfeit card fraud,” Chiro Aikat, SVP of product delivery and EMV for MasterCard, said in the release announcing the collaboration. “We are impressed with the progress that’s been made so far. We’re taking these steps today to continue the pace of adoption. Making our M/Chip Fast technology available to all parties is our latest investment in this ongoing commitment.”

The goal is to accelerate EMV adoption by accelerating the speed of transactions, which, in turn, helps the industry at large continue the fight against card-present fraud.

A fight that, according to data that MasterCard collected from some of the largest chip-enabled merchants in the country, chip technology is already blunting in a material way in the U.S.

According to MasterCard, the counterfeit card fraud at those merchants dropped by 39 percent in January 2016 compared to a year earlier. In terms of overall U.S. dollar volume, merchants saw a decrease of 27 percent in fraud in January 2016 compared to January 2015.