April 2009

Debit card use expands as Canada moves to chip cards

Nine out of ten Canadians own a debit card and many have more than one, Mark O’Connell, president and CEO of Interac Association, the Canadian ATM and debit payment network, recently told attendees at SourceMedia’s ATM, Debit & Prepaid Forum in Chandler, Arizona. He says that some 33 million consumers live in Canada, where financial institutions have issued some 35 million debit cards that are used to generate four billion transactions each year.

Interac has established a deadline to convert all Canadian ATMs to accept chip cards by the end of 2012 and all point-of-sale (POS) terminals to accept them by 2015. O’Connell said that the majority of the ATMs and POS terminals will be able to accept chip-based debit cards by 2010 and added that the conversion will make debit transactions more secure and allow for more functions on one card. Last fall, a chip card trial was launched in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. To date, chip cardholders there have made 2.4 million POS transactions and 1.8 million ATM transactions.