The need for businesses to adopt EMV technology continues to grow as the October 2015 deadline from MasterCard and Visa gets closer. However, while these two major players are pushing hard, what about the rest of the industry? Is wide-spread adoption really going to happen?

According to a recent study by the Aite Group, 70 percent of all U.S. credit cards and 41 percent of debit cards will have incorporated EMV technology by the end of 2015. That is a total of 1.1 billion cards. This information was gathered through interviews with 18 out of the top 40 credit card issuers, including seven of the top 10.

Julie Conroy, the research director at Aite Group, told Computerworld that  "A majority of Americans will have EMV cards in their wallets by the end of 2015."

This doesn't mean that the U.S. will be like the rest of the world when it comes to security. Overseas, EMV is paired with a PIN system that requires individuals to input their specific code at the time of payment to authenticate the transaction. This is an additional level of security that can help prevent credit card fraud. In the U.S., 13 of the 18 card providers interviewed said that they plan to only require a signature.

Just because there is a deadline, this does not mean that every organization needs to jump onboard right now. The upgrade is going to cost retailers and banks several billion dollars as 13 million point-of-sale systems will need to be upgraded or replaced. For smaller companies, the smarter course of action could be to wait and see how the early adopters fair and plot a course based off of the successes and failures of those implementations.