Figures released this week by EMVCo indicate that 45 percent of the world's payment cards and 76 percent of its payment terminals use EMV technology.

The data from the EMV standards body, which is jointly owned by American Express, JCB, MasterCard and Visa, represents the latest statistics as of Q4 2011 as provided by member financial institutions worldwide. Notably, the statistics do not include data from the U.S., where EMV has, as yet, made virtually no inroads.

The figures demonstrate that EMV technology continues to gain momentum with more than 1.5 billion EMV payment cards in circulation and 21.9 million EMV terminals active worldwide. 

"The implementation of EMV technology enables the industry to create a truly interoperable chip-based consumer payment infrastructure," said Patricia Partelow, chair of the EMVCo executive committee. "EMVCo works with industry stakeholders to continually advance the standard to ensure it supports the needs of the global payments marketplace and a common, robust technology platform is created, which supports contact, contactless and mobile interfaces for both online and offline payments."

The following EMVCo tables offer an overview of EMV adoption rates and regions:

For more on this topic, visit our EMV research center.