ARE extinct. I am visiting Australia right now and I have not signed a CC transaction in 10 days
Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
291–300 of 541 posts
Re: Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
#292So this comes up every time the US starts to approach the way credit and debit cards are processed in the rest of the world.
EMV (Euro/Master/Visa) defines the standard for a chip card. [1]
The cards can be configured as chip+signature, chip+pin or both. The priority ordering can be pin only, sig only, pin then sig or sig then pin (and a bunch of other esoteric rules).
Paywave (VISA) and Paypass (Mastercard) are contactless standards for EMV transactions.
The rules for chip+pin transfer the liability to the merchant (and the merchant bank) for fraudulent use. The liability moves from the card issuing bank. It's a "stick" to make the merchants upgrade. That's why merchants are going to at least chip+signature (ie EMV chip reduces fraud). Moving to chip+PIN reduces fraud even further.
The card issuing banks tend to introduce rules about how safe your PIN is and apply rules to your PIN to stop things like repetitive numbers (eg all 1s), sequences, birthdate matches etc.
Chip + PIN was introduced in the EU and other more advanced than the US banking environments (ie, everywhere) a number of years ago. The "liability shift" for Mastercard happened ~2006, Visa was ~2010, later in some places (eg AU was 2015).
It is only just happening in the US (according to Wikipedia it will be completed by 2020-10-01).
Paywave/Paypass implement new rules on when a PIN is required. In AU it is $100. If the amount is below that, then the liability is accepted by the merchant bank (ie the merchant will get paid). If it is >$100, then a PIN is required for the merchant bank to accept the transaction.
In Australia, if you report your card lost/stolen, then you are not responsible for Paywave/pass transactions. If you don't ("an unreasonably long time"), then you are, unless the card issuer (your bank) can chargeback the merchant (ie This applies to the Credit Card networks (Amex/MC/VISA/Discover/JCB/Union etc). MC and Visa also have "debit" cards that use the same network and are treated basically the same for the merchant.
There are other payment networks (eg in AU there is EFTPOS) which is an AU bank owned network that basically does direct debit from cardholder to merchant online. So if you actually insert your card in the reader, you'll get the choice of "CR" (ie the MC/VISA network, SAV (EFTPOS) or CHQ (EFTPOS)).
So an "ANZ Bank Mastercard" can have 3 different accounts attached, the Mastercard CC account, and two different savings accounts. No one really has a "cheque" account anymore. The banks also issue Mastercard/VISA debit cards (that also offer CC/SAV/CHQ, but CC actually means SAV) and their own debit cards (EFTPOS only).
EFTPOS has much lower fees for both merchants and the banks. That's why Apple Pay hasn't been accepted yet by 3 of the 4 major AU banks, because they don't want to lose their sweet EFTPOS network or pay more to MC and VISA. They also don't want to pay Apple (or Google) more fees in the interchange.
For a while, supermarkets were making people with MC/VISA debit cards insert their cards and only allow them to use the SAV/CHQ options so that they didn't have to pay CC transaction fees for EFTPOS debit transactions.
Anyway, the summary of all this is that moving the US away from signatures is painful because of the disjointed and irrational US banking and payment systems as well as the baked in insistence by users on signatures and paper checks (not cheques, 'cos nowhere that spells it correctly still uses them much :) ).
Re: Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... chip in Unintentional pun. The US public seems to have a huge reluctance to use the chips in the cards too. It's swipe and sign. (I'm also from Australia and signing for a credit card purchase went away decades ago. PayWave is really popular, my 89 yo mother loves it.)
US here, got issued a chipped card about a year ago and noticed quickly that any attempt to swipe with my card would be greeted with an error message and instructions to insert the chip. For all systems I've seen, it seems that if the merchant accepts chips and if the card has a chip, the chip must be used, regardless of any user reluctance.
Most readers I have experimented with in the US will allow a swipe after 3 unsuccesful chip reads (inserting card in opposite direction w/ chip exposed).
Re: Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
#294ARE extinct. I am visiting Australia right now and I have not signed a CC transaction in 10 days
I live in Australia and I haven't even signed my signed my credit card. Technically I'm supposed to, but I have never had to sign for a transaction in the past decade that I've been using cards.
Re: Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
And even earlier in other EU countries I imagine, as I was in Luxembourg in 2001 and used pin to pay in supermnarkets with my UK card.
Yes, I think it was way earlier than 2006. In France, every card in 1995 had chip and pin.
The UK was relatively late to the party, some large retailers here campaigned against it as they were afraid that going online for authorisations would increase the time it took to serve people. I believe that the offline mode was enough to appease them, even now you occasionally run up against offline-only EMV terminals.
Re: Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those cards work great in Europe, but are sometimes a pain to use in the US. E.g., if you're paying at a restaurant and you have to go with the waiter to the terminal in some backroom, because the terminal asks for the pin. Huh? I have a European card (chip & PIN, PIN preference), and at restaurants in the US I've always signed and never had to go to the terminal in some backroom.
Depends on the restaurant. Most of the times the terminal doesn't support PINs and so it falls back to signatures. But some restaurants use PIN-capable terminals in which case that issue occurs.
I think it also depends on what buttons they press. I believe if they select credit card it forces it to be a signature.
Re: Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes can we please get rid of tipping and pay waiters and staff what they should be earning? Build the price into the menu and let the market decide the price. Too expensive? You will lose customers. Too cheap? You will have lines out the door and you know you can increase prices. The rest of the world does not tip (Europe & Asia). Only in North America is this awkward tipping practice still a thing.
Personally I like tipping. I think people should still be paid well, but let me tip on top of it if I wish.
It's actually somewhat infantilizing to tip someone, unless they need it to be paid. You would never give a lawyer, consultant or someone else "respected" in society "2 dollars to buy something nice".
Tipping is a very in the face sign of inequality and really needs to die (as soon as the inequality is gone of course).
Re: Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
The kind of fraud prevented by a PIN enabled chip card is supposedly pretty rare. What would be more useful is a standard for browser attached chip card readers to bring the anti-fraud protections of a chip card to everyday Internet transactions.
> The kind of fraud prevented by a PIN enabled chip card is supposedly pretty rare. Are lost and stolen cards not a common problem? I suppose if the card holder reports it to the credit card company fast enough, it would prevent fraudulent charges from going through, but it would be nice if the person who found/stole the card(s) wasn't able to just use it without having to enter a PIN to do so.
Both the card and the terminal are able to make a decision about whether this transaction must be "online", a live session. If either insists on being "online" and that's not possible the transaction fails.
If the card is reported stolen, all such online transactions are (should be) blocked, and the risk is up to both the issuer (you could ship cards that insist on all transactions needing to be online, and some cards intended for people who struggle to manage their money do that) and the merchant (you can insist on going online for every transaction).
However, forcing every transaction online is super annoying. Train sat in a tunnel? No card purchased G&T for you until it gets out again. Internet down at the burger shack? No burger until their Internet is back up. Merchants would usually rather risk some fraud for smaller purchases, than lose sales when there's a problem.
"Weird money" causes the same issues, it's rare in the US but some places deliberately issue loads of different money that's all theoretically worth the same but you rarely see some types. In England for example a Scottish or Northern Irish bank note, issued with the name of some company you've never heard of, is still "worth" the same as familiar English notes. Except if you live closer to France than Scotland you've probably never seen one before. Maybe it's fake. Should you, as a shopkeeper, risk taking this weird-looking money? Again, risk of fraud versus risk of a lost sale.
Re: Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
#299Signatures haven't been required for credit cards in many other countries for quite some time now. I have often wondered why the US has historically lagged behind for everyday banking. (e.g. email money transfers, chip enabled cards, pin number verification, tap to pay)
The FT suggests this is a regulation vs competition problem, where regulation has "won": https://www.ft.com/content/03a1f4b0-06d3-11e4-ba32-00144feab...
It's a bit of a prisoners-dilemma thing: new technology can only be adopted with sufficient coordination, but each individual party is only interested in cooperating if they think they will "win" from it more than their competitors.
The US seems to be a very bad place for consumer advocacy in general. Perhaps it's seen as "anticapitalist". I don't know if the patchwork regulatory environment of the states helps or hinders this?
Re: Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK cards still have a signature strip on the back and if a merchant notices you haven't signed your card they legally have to refuse to accept it. I rarely remember to sign my cards and this tripped me up one time last year when trying to return something to a store which I'd bought online with my credit card. I had to leave the store, buy a pen, sign the card and re-enter the store.
> I had to leave the store, buy a pen, sign the card and re-enter the store. That's exactly what I did too. And yes, this was when visiting the UK. I had no idea the strip on the back of the card was for comparison, never seen it used elsewhere. Would be interesting to hear the person who thought that the signature-comparison thing was a good idea explain how they were thinking.
It's because in some countries, not everyone has an ID card on them at all times.
(Backwards, I know, but them's the breaks...)