While the rest of the world has been speeding toward the implementation of chips in credit cards, the United States has been in the slow lanes — but that could be changing soon in the U.S. because of mounting security concerns.
Europe and some nations on other continents now require that financial institutions that issue credit cards adopt the Europay MasterCard Visa (EMV) standard, a chip card specification. While the U.S. has thus far resisted adoption of EMV cards, there have been significant efforts to indicate that, however slowly, the U.S. is moving toward use of chip cards with personal identification numbers because the payment method is more secure.