Those new debit and credit cards — you know, the ones with a chip that have extended the time shoppers spend at checkout terminals — have been effective at lowering fraud rates, according to Visa Inc., but they still irritate people.

The U.S. migrated to EMV chip technology last October, adopting a system already in use in Europe. EMV is short for Europay, MasterCard and Visa. The chip cards are designed to curb fraud and to be more secure than the magnetic-stripe technology the U.S. has used for decades.

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For those merchants that accept chip cards, counterfeit fraud fell 26% in January, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to Visa V, -1.29% .

The chip-enabled debit and credit cards have garnered a fair share of complaints: They’re confusing, they’re not accepted everywhere and they make transactions at merchant registers seconds longer. But Mark Ranta, senior solutions consultant for digital channels for universal payment company ACI Worldwide, said they are hands-down better than magnetic stripe.

“People sometimes don’t know what’s good for them,” Ranta said. “EMV is better than swipe, it’s more secure.”

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However, the migration and adoption hasn’t gone quite as hoped, he said. Visa said it has issued 282 million chip cards (debit and credit), but Ranta — who personally has 13 cards, all with chip technology — said the adoption is still being held back by merchants and retailers.

“We’re probably at 1-in-5 retailers accepting chip cards,” Ranta said. “I thought we’d see a much bigger jump at the beginning. I thought we’d be at 75% adoption by now and that the remaining 25% would have much longer tail. But it feels like we’re not even close to 75%.”

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Visa said it has 1.1 million merchants that are now chip-enabled, up from 397,000 at the beginning of October. Visa is one of the largest credit card networks in the U.S., serving 8 million merchants, according to personal finance and research website WalletHub. As a point of reference, there were 28 million small businesses in the U.S. in 2010, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

While chip cards have been successful in tackling fraud, there are still steps to take in adoption and educating merchants and consumers on using chip cards at checkout.

“There’s a very confused population out there,” Rand said. “They’re not sure what to do. Do I swipe? Do I dip? What do you mean dip? What do I call it? There’s all kinds of nomenclature. As a consumer, it’s maddening.”