For at least the last few years, every time I stick my debit card into a slot, I am given the option of typing in my PIN and hitting Enter or simply hitting Enter. I’m fairly sure this happens regardless of where I am or how much I’m paying. I want to figure out which to do.
It boils down to two questions:
What is the difference to me and my finances?
What is the difference for the vendor?
I assume that the answer to 1 is “None,” and the answer to 2 has to do with the way the bank applies transaction fees. This doesn’t matter much to me when I’m at Walmart or TGIFridays, but I wonder about it when I’m at a local store whose owner I know.
P.S. I searched the archives and didn’t find anything less than 20 years old, so if I’m re-asking a previously posted question, that’s why.
I think the big question here is, when you don’t use the PIN, is it being run as a credit card instead of a debit card? That changes a lot of what’s going on behind the scenes.
I don’t think I’ve come across what you’re suggesting, but where I am, I have the option of tapping my card wirelessly on the machine for a transaction of £100 or under, or putting my card in the slot and inserting my pin for transactions over that amount. It’s a layer of security that the bank puts on the transaction to make sure some random hasn’t run off with my card and is now running up 1000s, not of how the transaction is handled or whether the vendor pays a transaction fee (they do, whatever).
I’ve noticed the bank doesn’t put a similar financial limit on Apply Pay payments, presumably because Apply Pay adds that extra layer of security through face recognition.
This is a uniquely American thing where the credit card companies are deathly afraid of people reverting to cheques because they can’t remember a 4 digit PIN. The rest of the world uses chip+PIN or contactless for all transactions.
You need to enter a PIN to get cash back. Otherwise it’s being treated as a credit card. I don’t know if there are debit-only cards that can’t be used as a credit card. If there are maybe they always require a PIN or maybe there’s a way to require a PIN for any card.
Close, but not quite right.
If Bank A requires a PIN & Bank B doesn’t & the customer forgets their PIN then they pull out card B & that then goes back into the front of their wallet. Heck, even if both banks require a PIN & you’re at the checkout & have a problem, you’ll pull out Bank B’s card & use that & that goes back into the front of the wallet & therefore becomes many/most people’s primary card & therefore Bank A doesn’t make as much money going forward. They figure they’ll lose a lot more in exchange fees/regular income minus potential fraud losses than if they did implement Chip+Pin & didn’t have as much activity but even less fraud
It might be uniquely American - but is having a Mastercard or Visa branded debit card also uniquely American? Because I think that has a lot to do with it.
I also seem to remember ads encouraging people to sign when paying with a debit card - the encouragement was some sort of contest where signature transactions were an entry - and I always assumed that was because Mastercard/Visa/issuing banks charged higher fees for signature based transaction than for PIN based ones.
The odds of forgetting PIN A vs. B are the exact same as B vs. A.
I was making light of the fact that using cheques (checks) at the retail level in the 21st century is uniquely American. Everywhere else in the credit granting world uses chip+PIN and seems to avoid the problem of forgotten PINs.
Canada has Interac, which is a low cost interchange network owned by the banks for point-of-sale debit. Most debit cards are cobranded as Visa/MC debit which is only used for online transactions.
Cards here are either credit or debit, there is no confusion as to what you want to do when you insert the card.
Yes, but it’s at least 5 years behind most other countries. I don’t think I’ve handed my card to a sever in a restaurant in Canada in the last 10 years. My rolled out wireless POS terminals ages ago. I was at a Cheesecake Factory in Buffalo earlier this year and they still had to take my card away to run it and then enter my tip by hand on the paper receipt.
Same in Canada. Retailers here haven’t accepted cheques in at least the last decade. Credit/debit only is becoming more common, but I’m not really aware of it as I don’t carry cash other than for my local tailor who is cash only.
I have a similar issue but reversed. I have a credit card (Mastercard) with US Bank. That credit card is the only business/account I have with them. At most places the card works as expected but at some I am prompted for a PIN. I don’t have a PIN set up for the credit card. At the places that request it there is usually an option to “bypass PIN” but not all. For example, I can’t buy stamps at the post office via their stamp machine because I don’t have a PIN and can’t bypass the prompt. The big question for me though is why do some places ask for a PIN when I use a card that is purely a credit card and not a debit card?
I’ve got a tax refund check from the government here, and there’s no where left to pay it in. All the banks in town have closed and I’d have to go to the next town to find anywhere to pay it in.
That’s a different issue (wireless card readers), not related to contactless. That is, it’s possible for the waiter to bring a wireless card reader to the table which doesn’t have contactless capability, and it’s possible that the waiter takes the card away to a machine in the back that does use a contactless tap.
I certainly can, using the Bank of America iPhone app. I’m sure all big banks allow this nowadays. The issue, as I’ve mentioned before, is that there are over 4,000 banks in the United States, and many of them are really tiny, so don’t have apps with the latest features.
I don’t know the situation for @Mk_VII but I have known people who deposited checks by mail. Though today even many of the smaller banks have banking apps.