Weekly EMV Industry News Roundup – 22 July 2016

EMV Group Rebrands to go Beyond Chip Cards

PaymentsSource

• The industry-led EMV Migration Forum is changing its name and expanding its focus to accommodate the myriad changes that are happening alongside the move to chip cards.
• Now called The U.S. Payments Forum, it will address the challenges that retailers, acquirers, issuers, processors and technology companies face given the ongoing development of tokenization, contactless payments, mobile technology, point to point encryption and other digital technologies.

Visa Releases New EMV Data

PYMTS

• As of the end of last month, Visa reported that there are now 326.8 million chip cards in the U.S. market — a number that outweighs the actual number of residents in the country.
• The card network’s latest data shows that the U.S added more than 100,000 chip-enabled merchant locations last month, bringing the total number to 1.3 million. That represents nearly 28 percent of the entire merchant population in the U.S. More than three-quarters of the merchants that are ready and able to accept chip card payments are small and medium-sized businesses, Visa said.

EMV Migration Forum Changes name to U.S. Payments Forum

Finextra

• The EMV Migration Forum has been instrumental in the progress of the U.S. migration to EMV chip technology by providing a forum for essential cooperation and coordination across the whole payments ecosystem, including retailers, card issuers, networks, acquirers, processors, technology providers and industry associations.
• To provide expanded support for the payments ecosystem, the EMV Migration Forum today announced that it will change its name to the U.S. Payments Forum. The U.S. Payments Forum will continue to support the chip migration while also broadening its focus to other new and emerging payments technologies in the U.S.