Visa USA has reported that U.S. financial institutions have issued more than one million credit and debit cards that use information on embedded computer chips to validate transactions instead of magnetic stripe technology.

"Migrating the U.S. market to chip [cards] will help build an infrastructure for accepting NFC mobile payments, enhance international acceptance and reduce fraud," said Stephanie Ericksen, head of authentication product integration at Visa Inc. "Since announcing our roadmap last year, we have seen strong interest among U.S. issuers large and small to invest in chip technology, as today's milestone shows. The progress is all the more significant considering that just 18 months ago there were no Visa-branded EMV contact chip cards issued in the U.S." 

The roadmap to which Erickson referred is Visa's plan to use incentives to convince retailers and payment processors and acquirers to shift their technology to support the chip cards. Under Visa's approach, both methods, as well as no signature required, will continue to be available to issuers and merchants in the U.S. according to their preferences. Retailers that make the shift to terminals that supported both the chip cards and the contactless transactions could be excused from some of the card data security requirements that many have found burdensome and expensive.