Remember how s-l-o-w dipping your payment card seemed when you were shopping back in 2015? Molasses? Honey? The dregs of the ketchup bottle? These days, I'm dipping more—that is, inserting my card into a chip reader—and complaining about it less. (I don't have a contactless card, so tapping isn't yet an option for me.) I still think swiping is faster, but familiarity means that dipping bugs me less. And it's become rare for me to encounter a jerry-rigged chip reader with the insert slot blocked by cardboard or duct tape, forcing me to swipe instead.
Turns out my shopping experiences—dipping more—line up with new data released by the Federal Reserve Payments Study in December 2018. The study reports some information on how in-person general-purpose card payments were authenticated in the United States in 2017.
For the first time, more than half of these payments by value were chip-authenticated in 2017. In contrast, just three percent of general-purpose card payments used chips in 2015—hence, my lack of familiarity with dipping back in the day. Because contactless chip cards were in use before the EMV-based dipping method began to take off in 2015, these data are an approximation of the increasing use of dipping, not an exact measure.
The chart below is based on figure 8 in the Federal Reserve Payments Study: 2018 Annual Supplement; it shows the substantial uptake in chip authentication at the point of sale from 2016 to 2017. (Check out the supplement for more detail.)
Note: Chip payments were a negligible fraction in 2012.
Source: Federal Reserve Payments Study data (available here and here)
By number, more than 40 percent of general-purpose card payments were chip-authenticated. By card type, credit card payments are most likely to be chip-authenticated and prepaid card payments are least likely to be chip-authenticated (see the chart below). Prepaid cards are less likely to be chip-enabled, certainly a factor in the low shares of chip authentication, in part because of a business decision not to go to the expense of adding chips to low-value cards.
By this time next year, my view of dipping could have changed again. A large card issuer has announced that all its credit cards will be tap-to-pay (that is, contactless) by mid-2019, so it's possible that my dipping will go the way of swiping.
For me, it feels more natural and faster to insert a chip card than it did a year ago. How about you?
By Claire Greene, a payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed