Around 70 Percent Of Financial Cards Now Have A Chip

The International Card Manufacturing Association (ICMA) is out with a new report that finds 70 percent of all financial cards have a chip embedded in them.

In a press release issued Tuesday (May 16), the ICMA said chip cards account for 88.6 percent of revenue for cards globally manufactured in 2016. What’s more, the trade group said the size of the market globally was $27.4 billion in 2016, resulting in 35.4 billion cards produced last year.

“The global card industry continues to provide growth opportunities in several geographic regional and vertical markets,” Al Vrancart, ICMA founder emeritus and industry advisor, said in the press release. “The outlook for 2017 and beyond is for continued moderate global dollar growth and buoyant card units.”

According to ICMA, the new report shows 0.8 percent global card unit growth to 35.4 billion cards manufactured with $19.8 billion in revenues, representing a 3.1 percent dollar growth last year. In addition, there was $7.55 billion worth of personalization and fulfillment services for a total of $27.35 in revenue in 2016. ICMA looked at five regional markets: North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Within these regions, ICMA analyzed card units manufactured in 12 vertical market segments including prepaid phone, SIM mobile phone, financial, gift, government/health, retail and gas, transportation, loyalty and promotional, ID and membership, access control, unprinted blanks, and other.

ICMA found Asia- Pacific was in the lead with 14.15 billion cards produced, marking 5.1 percent unit growth and resulting in $9.15 billion revenue with 2.7 percent dollar growth during the prior year. North America was in second place, with 9.31 billion cards manufactured, and was number three in terms of dollars at $3.47 billion with 6.7 percent growth driven by continued chip card penetration. Europe ranked number two in dollars at $4.61 billion and number three in units at 5.9 billion cards with growth of 2.6 percent in dollars and 2.1 percent in units, ICMA said.