About Smart Cards : Introduction : Market Information

Smart Card Market Information

Global Smart Card Shipments: Devices Incorporating Smart Card Technology

Eurosmart conducts an annual market study on global shipments for “secure elements” – i.e., devices incorporating smart card technology.

  • Eurosmart reported that 9.9 billion devices incorporating smart card technology will ship globally in 2017– 3% growth over 2016.
  • Eurosmart has forecast that over 10.2 billion devices will ship in 2018 – 3% growth over 2017.

EMV Credit and Debit Chip Card Issuance

Financial institutions and merchants in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia/Pacific, and Canada are issuing and accepting contact or dual-interface EMV chip cards for credit and debit payment or migrating to EMV.

According to EMVCo, over 7.0 billion EMV cards were in circulation at the end of 2017 and 63.7 percent of all card-present transactions undertaken globally used EMV chip technology.  As of the end of 2017, over 780 million EMV chip cards have been issued in the U.S., with 59% of U.S. merchant locations accepting EMV chip transactions accounting for 41.2 percent of card-present transactions.

The Secure Technology Alliance Payments Council and its affiliated organization, the U.S. Payments Forum, have active programs to provide educational resources on EMV and to address issues that require broad cooperation and coordination across many constituents in the payments space in order to successfully introduce secure EMV contact and contactless technology in the U.S.

The Alliance and the Forum have published a variety of resources to assist payments industry stakeholders with EMV migration; resources are available on the EMV Connection web site.