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Visa Dropping Signature Requirement for Chip Cards and Apple Pay Starting in April
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The real difference in the US is that banks have spent millions and decades honing computerized fraud detection. Plus they make a ton of money charging for taking the fraud risks. That’s why they’re less worried about security measures. If security was perfect, they couldn’t charge as much.
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That's probably unlikely since they're going away from chip and PIN for smaller transactions in other countries. But who knows?
Thanks for saving me the trouble of a "there I fixed it for you" post, lol....
A number of US-based "chip and sign" cards are seemingly capable of being used in "chip and PIN" transactions - you just need to contact the bank and get it set up (obviously before traveling!). It's too bad they don't just do it by default.
Capital One has it already. Not very well advertised though.
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This. I too think this is the prime reason in the US. Off topic but only in the US I am stressed while traveling. How much to tip the waiter, how much to tip a cab, a baggage handler. I remember when I first visited US 10% in a restaurant was the norm, it became 15% and now it’s 20. Not sure why we are directly paying the wages of the waiters. Who was the first person to tip a baggage handler. Even a barber that owns his own shop expects a tip.
I was recently in Australia and nowhere there was an expectation of a tip. I guess they pay their employees well. New Zealand was the same.
It’s always quite jarring when I realise that shoppers in the US still need to write their signature on a slip of paper. We’ve had chip & pin (and the elimination of signatures) in Europe for almost 14 years now. It’s amazing it’s taking this long for the US to make the same progress.
Curious. Is it Apple's fault or your government/banks? I can't think of a reason Apple would specifically limit a market. They want to make money.
So those banking concerns who are converting their Visa credit cards to MasterCard should have waited? Or are the fees charged by Visa the reason some banking concerns have switched?
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Do you in the UK have no ID theft? And we don't write / sign on a slip of paper - usually it's electronic.
Read the article then. Visa was the industry’s last follower.
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This is generally a standard feature of any chip equipped cc.
In our case, since we use ApplePay at all NFC equippedPOS terminals, we see the RF antenna in such cards as a liability (these can be scanned and copied by crooks when in your pocket), so we take two actions:
1. We request a card with chip but without the contactless feature (this is like 1/2 the ccs we’ve seen);
2. Where (1) is not possible, we disable the antenna. We hold the card up to a bright light to see where the antenna lead is buried in the card, and then punch thru the card near to where it attaches to the chip.
Apple Pay is used everywhere possible and where not, the chip on the plastic is.
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Actually the false start in the US with chip and contactless was due to:
1. Lack of coordination between the card issuers and the merchants. The card networks tried to import the tech from Europe (who had the bigger fraud problem earlier and thus developed the solution sooner) but the infrastructure to read a chip or RF antenna didn’t exist in the USA (and so few Yanks travelled outside the USA it didn’t make sense to equip every one of them with advanced cards when the mag stripe worked alongside the chip feature in foreign POS terminals);
2. Lack of cooperation from merchants. Who wants to spend to upgrade when there are no cards, and the card networks eat the cost of fraud.
Now with the liability shift from networks to merchants on non chip reading devices, US merchants have slowly begun the upgrade process.
In the US it’s said that 50-60% are there (yet most of the fuel industry missed their deadline of end-2016(7?) and got an extension to end-2018(IIRC).
Some big merchants, ie Costco, have new nfc equipped POS gear at till and pump but have not turned it on, others, ie Kroger, successfully tested in a single market but didn’t roll out investment and installation to other markets.
Ps we were told by Costco management, that the chip processes too slowly and raises the cost of a transaction by lowering thruput, and that Costco might just skip activating the chip in favor of only activating the nfc feature (this presumably would require Citibank to lift the upper limit trigger that requires a signature.) I’m not sure how they do this in Costco Canada stores because they have functional contactless card readers (but their own CapitolOne Costco MasterCard does not have a contactless feature. LoL.)
And then there are other countries that do accept contactless nearly everywhere, Sweden, UK, CA, AU, etc. where contactless is ubiquitous.
At some places yeah. The software changes needed for full support of Apple Pay/Android Pay are pretty intense. It’s not a shock that they didn’t get everything sorted at once.
Those aren't true Chip & Pin, it's ATM Pin so any purchase would be like a cash advance on your credit card. Any true chip & pin credit card would have you set it up from the beginning as it needs to be either embedded or enciphered into the actual chip or for call-back to the bank. But you can look up which cards offer true chip & pin here: http://www.spotterswiki.com/emv/index.php
Costco in the US has had contact EMV enabled since early 2017, and has already started enabling contactless EMV in some locations, with the full rollout supposed to complete "soon".
Costco in Canada has had both for a while (although they were one of the last major merchants to implement EMV - but they would lose the ability to process cards if they did not), and the Capital One Costco MasterCard does indeed have contactless
Not really - if by full support you mean to support Device Verification (and therefore large value payments without additional verification), the support for this was built into the EMV contactless specs from each of the card networks for many years before Apple Pay existed. So in most places outside the US, this was a simple configuration change to some limits in the terminal.
The problem in the US is most contactless terminals, especially at large merchants, still only support mag-stripe-based contactless and therefore can't support this. This also means that many of these terminals are non-compliant with card network standards.
Writing See ID is stupid as most places you run the card yourself. However at a lot of these places after running the card the screen says “Show card to cashier” which I’m guessing here is where they’re supposed to compare the signatures. Which of course they don’t.
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It’s not a piece of paper. It’s an electronic pad, that also has a PIN pad on it. We do have chip & PIN, but only with debit cards.
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Most resorts don’t have chip readers, even in countries with full chip acceptance like U.K.
Same with rental cars.
I never understood that but even outside the US they still swipe & sign in these instances.
Apparently it’s because not enough Germans have credit cards, and because Apple’s smartphone share here is much lower than elsewhere. Only around 20% of smartphones in Germany are iPhones. Additionally, only around 15% or so of the EFTPOS machines here are capable of accepting contactless payment methods.
Hopefully that wasn't a recent conversation!
The solution to speeding up throughput with chip cards is Quick Chip. VISA came up with that, but all of the major brands support it.
With Quick Chip, the chip card can be inserted/removed while the cashier is ringing up the sale. You don't have to wait until the very end of the transaction to remove the card anymore...
I live in the UK and can't remember the last time I had to sign a Visa payment. Certainly not in the last five years possibly ten. That includes car hire.
(One single exception comes to mind. Making a Visa payment during a power cut where the cashier had dug out that clunky machine takes an imprint of the card. I doubt the majority of young people behind tills these days even know such things exist.)
I’m surprised that the card imprinter thing the cashier still knows how to use! Though we have a worse way, hand write the numbers so they can manually key it later!
I’m thankful we have chip and PIN for the most part now but people doing stuff like this negates the security of it.