Dear Subscriber,

As we cross over into the second half of the year, new data is published that shows chip payment card numbers are growing globally, with regions such as Asia Pacific seeing huge increases in percentage of card-present EMV chip transactions.

Staying in Asia for a second, China’s already impressive social payments scene is about to get another player as social payments firm Circle has scored $60m in fresh funding and announces that it’s created a new subsidiary in the country and prepares to enter Spain as its next European market.

Elsewhere in the newsletter, an infographic looks to the future and assesses the importance of the Internet of Things, whilst American Express is following Visa and MasterCard’s example of making the process of merchant EMV migration in the US easier by changing its fraud chargeback policies.

Enjoy!

Circle lands $60m new funding, announces China subsidiary and plans Spain launch.

Following the predictions made by the British public that include the UK becoming a cashless society within the next two decades and clothes being connected to the internet, this infographic from Wirecard and Statista takes a detailed look at the rise of the Internet of Things from various angles and tracks the increasing amount of cashless transactions being made.

The number of EMV chip cards in global circulation has increased to 4.8 billion by the end of 2015, an increase of 1.4 billion year-on-year, according to Global technical body EMVCo.

After Visa recently announced that it is changing its chargebacks policy in a bid to increase EMV migration following the October fraud liability shift, American Express is doing the same by allowing merchants to avoid being liable for for chargebacks for counterfeit fraud when a transaction is under $25.