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Twenty-two countries, including much of Europe, Mexico, Brazil and Japan, have adopted the technology, according to the Smart Card Alliance, a nonprofit association that promotes chip cards. About 50 other countries are in various stages of migrating to the technology in the next two years, including China, India and most of Latin America, according to the association.

In the last year, Canada began rolling out chip-and-PIN cards and plans to stop accepting magnetic stripe debit cards at A.T.M.’s after 2012 and at point-of-sale terminals after 2015.

These governments like the cards because they reduce fraud. With an embedded microcontroller, large amounts of data can be stored on the card itself rather than in a central database, and counterfeiting such a card is difficult.

But the United States banking industry has no immediate plans to adopt the technology. Part of the reason, experts say, is that fraud issues haven’t been as prevalent here as in other countries.

The expense of converting the country to chip-and-PIN technology is also a deterrent. Javelin Strategy and Research, a consulting company for the financial services industry, has estimated the cost for the United States’ to migrate to the technology at $5.5 billion, mainly for new payment terminals — an expense that neither retailers nor banks want to shoulder.

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