US Payments Forum Market Snapshot: Contactless payments, fraud, what's up in 2019

The U.S. Payments Forum has released its quarterly Market Snapshot, providing a look at the state of EMV chip adoption in the U.S., fraud and what's next for payments in 2019.

According to a forum press release, 99 percent of the top 200 retailers are now chip-enabled, and chip-on-chip transactions make up 60 percent of overall transactions in the U.S. More than 50 percent of transactions are taking place at contactless payment-enabled merchants.

According to U.S. Payments Forum director Randy Vanderhoof, "We're seeing steady upticks in contactless and mobile wallet transaction volumes, but most card issuers and merchants are evaluating the business case and planning for next year. 2019 will be a year where we'll see dual-interface cards hit the market and more merchants become enabled to accept them. It's likely we'll see this happen most in metropolitan areas with larger transit systems, as they are migrating to EMV contactless at the same time."

The forum offered clarification in response to media coverage of a report questioning the effectiveness of chip card payments at reducing fraud.

Vanderhoof said that the report offers no data on actual occurrence of fraud. "Chip payments were introduced to curb in-store counterfeit card fraud, which was the largest source of fraud in the U.S.," he said in the release. "Counterfeit card fraud is down over 80 percent at merchants that have enabled chip, so it is indeed working. We're also seeing card-not-present fraud staying relatively even as a percentage of online sales."

In 2019, the Forum will focus several projects on helping the industry understand e-commerce authentication methodologies and standards — i.e., EMV 3DS, W3C web payments and web authentication, FIDO and EMV Secure Remote Commerce — and how they can best be implemented for payment credential, user and transaction authentication in e-commerce.

Viewthe full market snapshot