A company wants to have access to information about who I am as well as all of my purchasing behavior regardless of which merchant it is? Where do I sign up?!?!
Coin
681–690 of 720 posts
Re: Coin
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most self-swipe checkouts, it seems like this card would work well (coffee shop, grocery store, etc). But, it isn't too uncommon to have a merchant request to see the card, and some larger retailers (e.g., Lowes) have to input numbers off the front of the card, as well.
I know that the processing at the one store I work at requires that we input the last four of the card. There's no way to over ride this on our end.
I wonder what that gains them... maybe crooks are reusing legitimate cards but programming in different stolen numbers in them?
Re: Coin
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canada already went through this. It started with the POS terminals, then gradually the cards were replaced with chip cards, then gradually the text on the terminal changed from "Swipe card" to "Swipe or Insert card". From a consumer perspective, it was virtually painless. The biggest change is that credit card transactions now require a PIN (assuming a chip card and chip-enabled POS).
Much easier to do in Canada with the number of banks involved. The US would be an entirely different story. The lack of chip card support in Coin effectively makes it a US only product at this point as most of the card-heavy countries have moved past mag swipe (or, are in the process).
Nah, just have the major banks start issuing chip cards, and then providing chip terminals to merchants. Once the terminals are in-place and work, everyone else has a strong incentive to catch up (fraud prevention) and a lower cost of entry (since they don't have to push merchants to support their new tech).
Once a quarter of cards sport chips and a quarter of machines support chips, it's just a question of issuing new chip cards when old cards come due (or get lost/stolen).
Re: Coin
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
The chip is available on all of the Amex charge cards, green through platinum. Just ask customer service for it.
Thought that was all chip-and-signature instead of chip-and-pin. Chip-and-sig is almost useless. Also, I'm a stingy bastard with the fabled Unicorn Card (Zync) that's no longer offered. I think any changes would mean a forced upgrade. I'm worried about a forced upgrade when the card expires too.
Here's a very thorough spreadsheet from the FlyerTalk forums: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/17837493-post1.html
There are a handful of credit unions that issue dual C&S/C&P cards. It's a little harder to get one than an ordinary card, but probably worth it if you're traveling abroad. (I got one from Andrews.)
Re: Coin
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why the US hasn't adopted EMV. It's not perfect, but it has cut down fraud massively here in Europe. They're very hard to clone (I won't say impossible, but attacks against EMV have not generally been of this nature) and the transaction records at both ends will tell you whether the actual, real card was there. The liability is more clear-cut as a result. If the customer claims the charge was unauthorise…
So that's why this video was so confusing to me. It was essentially this guy sliding someones card (he claims it's his, but neither the device nor the card know, right?) and then happily paying stuff with it through his fake replica (or the high-tech version of it, the 'coin'). It seemed like a completely unusable system for it's complete lack of any security. (Particularly if you consider there are now live payment…
What really concerns me is that these Coin people are now selling, for a trivial fee, a system for other people to clone my card. If I lived in the US where mag stripes were the norm, I would be seriously concerned about this.
Thankfully, in Canada, everything is done via chips, so even with Visa purchases my card never leaves my hand (or at least, my sight). Restaurants bring the terminal to your table, they process everyone there, and then you're done. Sending your card away feels almost archaic now (and a bit patrician, which has its appeal).
Re: Coin
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canada already went through this. It started with the POS terminals, then gradually the cards were replaced with chip cards, then gradually the text on the terminal changed from "Swipe card" to "Swipe or Insert card". From a consumer perspective, it was virtually painless. The biggest change is that credit card transactions now require a PIN (assuming a chip card and chip-enabled POS).
Much easier to do in Canada with the number of banks involved. The US would be an entirely different story. The lack of chip card support in Coin effectively makes it a US only product at this point as most of the card-heavy countries have moved past mag swipe (or, are in the process).
You can magstripe in much of mainland Europe still.
The Chip and Pin machines have a channel to swipe. There are very few places where you hand over a card. For example, in the train stations, the machine to swipe a card is on the same side of the glass as the customer. The agent never handles your card.
So they might be more accepting of Coin (given that they don't see that it is different) than American businesses.
Re: Coin
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thought that was all chip-and-signature instead of chip-and-pin. Chip-and-sig is almost useless. Also, I'm a stingy bastard with the fabled Unicorn Card (Zync) that's no longer offered. I think any changes would mean a forced upgrade. I'm worried about a forced upgrade when the card expires too.
Whether chip and sig is accepted in places around europe will probably depend on the software they have, the merchant's agreement with their acquirer, whether it's an unattended terminal and a bunch of other stuff. Surprised to hear it's next to useless, but not really surprising that it's less useful.
I was up in Canada a few months ago, where EMV cards are ubiquitous. C&S is accepted everywhere, but merchants routinely get confused by the second receipt printing out. I've heard it's the same in Europe.
Re: Coin
#688Windows Phone not supported -> fail.
Win for all the other platforms with millions more users.
Re: Coin
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why the US hasn't adopted EMV. It's not perfect, but it has cut down fraud massively here in Europe. They're very hard to clone (I won't say impossible, but attacks against EMV have not generally been of this nature) and the transaction records at both ends will tell you whether the actual, real card was there. The liability is more clear-cut as a result. If the customer claims the charge was unauthorise…
As I Canadian I also read this with a little sadness. It's something I have always wanted ... but now someone made it just as we're close to finishing the transition to EMV. It can actually be a bit tricky to use my company card to buy lunch at restaurants sometimes because "there's no chip". Their FAQ says future versions of Coin will support EMV, but I'm not familiar enough with the hardware to know how difficult t…
As another Canadian:
1. Chip cards do make this almost completely irrelevant
2. Supporting EMV is going to be tricky, because cloning those cards is also tricky (skimmers have spent hundreds of thousands on it and haven't figured it out).
3. Most membership cards, even ones that have magnetic stripes on them, actually use the barcodes on the card. Safeway, CostCo, Shoppers, etc. all have mag stripes, but they all use the barcodes. The Coin won't help you with a single one of them.
4. If, as a cashier, someone handed me a Coin and said 'It's okay, it's a Visa', I would say 'no'. No signature, no card number, no anything. There's no difference from my perspective between a person putting their Visa onto the Coin and a person putting someone else's Visa onto the coin, and I'm not going to start accepting obviously cloned cards regardless of who's holding it.
Re: Coin
#690"...attracted the attention of Osama Bedier, the former head of Google Wallet, who’s an investor in Coin. Bedier spent years attempting to make Wallet the NFC payments standard of future phones, but Google abandoned his work to pivot the product into yet another PayPal competitor. "[Bedier] sees scale at Coin … where he didn’t see scale in current solutions," a company spokesperson said on Bedier’s behalf. And for what it’s worth, Parashar says he hopes to develop a way to let users activate Coin (or disable the "lost" feature) even when a phone’s not around."
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/14/5103820/coin-electronic-c...