NEW YORK – Chase is moving ahead with plans to convert the vast majority of its issued cards to EMV-compliant chip cards by the end of the year. The expansion will include debit cards, credit cards and ATMs, in order to help its consumers become better protected as part of the push toward EMV chip-enabled payments.
According to news reports, Chase will convert more than 70% of all its credit and debit cards by the end of 2015. The company says that will allow more than 80% of its cardholder spending to be done using chip-enabled cards. Chase said that they currently have more than 22 million chip cards in the market, noting that Chase was the first U.S. credit card issuer to issue a chip-enabled card.
“Fraud and security threats facing consumer payments today is a complex issue that can’t be solved with any single technology,” Gordon Smith, CEO of Chase Consumer and Community Banking, said in a news release. “We’re working to employ a variety of approaches to protect our customers – adopting chip technology is a critical step on this journey.”
Despite the push from issuers and banks to educate the general public and merchants on EMV technology, a recent Chase survey shows that a majority of Americans aren’t aware of chip technology, writes Pymnts.com this week. The survey indicated that 80% of customers have concerns about the security of their card transactions, and 65% of those surveyed hadn’t actually heard of the technology.
The web-based news source also points out that the Chase survey included results on what consumers believe the point of EMV to be. A majority (76%) said they think the technology will help small businesses prevent fraud.
As part of their announcement, Chase also indicated that it will work to help chip technology continue to gain wider acceptance among its consumer and business customers, which means offering those customers access to terminals that would enable businesses to actually accept chip cards, mobile wallets, contactless payments and the traditional swipe payments at the POS. Chase is among the participants in the Payments Security Task Force that have joined together to promote educational events and materials to help spread awareness about the importance of payment cards that are EMV chip-enabled.