Hard as it is to believe, my bank actually did something that wasn’t a pittable offense. It just sent me a Chip and PIN Visa card. Any euro-dopers are probably scratching their heads in bewilderment, but it’s a technology that’s only just creeping into the US. Traveling anywhere in Europe is getting to be tricky without one.
Of course, they forgot to mention that I actually needed a PIN to use it :smack:
Presumably the PIN will come in the mail in a couple days. You can then change it to something else if you’d like. That’s how my bank handles it.
I just received my chip&pin MasterCard last week. They were slow to get around to it since the card was formerly owned by CitiBank and now belongs to CIBC, so presumably they held off until the switch was complete.
I also have a CIBC Visa card and now my ATM/Debit/Interac card is also chip&pin, also from CIBC and is labelled as a CIBC Visa Debit (so we can now use it in the US/overseas as a debit card!)
All three cards are now similar shades of red, though with different patterns/image.
Debit. Visa. MasterCard.
I’m having a hell of a time telling them apart in my wallet, and now the colour scheme isn’t sufficient to remind me of my PIN, so I always have to think about it. I’m thinking of changing at least one of the cards just to get it to look different! Stupid bank.
<scratches head> My credit cards all became ‘chip cards’ about a year ago. Are us Canadians ahead of our US counterparts on something?
For once. 
I’ve been wondering when we’d get these in the US. I assume that one of the ways to encourage vendors to accept the new version is by offering them a lower interchange fee on such transactions? e.g. they pay 2% for non-chip transactions and 1.5 if chip and pin?
And how will it work for online purchases? Obviously most people won’t have their own readers at home, and I can’t help thinking that these days, a significant portion of fraudulent purchases are done that way.
Are merchants set up to process these transactions yet? Doesn’t there have to be a special reader?
I’ve been discovering here that a lot of our banking systems are ahead of the US. Chip cards and the ease of email transfers are the couple that I’ve seen.
The chip & pin cards also have a magnetic stripe. Until a merchant gets a new reader the card gets run through the reader the traditional way.
Don’t forget online debit. Transactions made with our Interac debit cards are ‘online’: they are processed immediately, with the system querying the bank as the customer waits at the point of sale. The transaction is accepted or declined on the spot.
My impression with US debit cards is that they have Visa and Mastercard logos and are ‘offline’: they are not processed immediately, but are processed through the credit-card system, which takes several days to post transactions to your account. Thus you can have transactions waiting, and spend the money again, and when the transactions arrive, there’s no money left in your account, and you go onto overdraft.
I’ve been reading up on this, and apparently there is online debit in the Visa and Mastercard world. It’s called “Visa Electron” and “Mastercard Maestro”. But for some reason the US and Canada don’t have it. Perhaps Interac occupies that market in Canada, but I’m not sure about the States.
mnemosyne, is your Visa Debit card online or offline? Have you used it as Visa Debit? I read somewhere that Canadian Visa Debit cards will work as Visa Debit only outside Canada, and inside Canada, you can only use Interac debit.
Two long-running threads from the FlyerTalk forums discussing Chip-and-PIN cards and their arrival, or lack thereof, in the States:
Does anyone in US offer EMV (Chip & PIN)? [Practical discussion]
USA issuers announce EMV cards (Chip & PIN -or- Chip & Signature)
The CIBC Visa Debit card is a chip&pin card that works as an Interac card in Canada (so “online” on the Interac network and as my ATM card) but functions somehow as a Debit card probably similar to the US-style ones (offline, if you say so) if I’m in the USA or overseas. I have used it as an Interac card and it’s the same as always, except now it’s inserted into the machine instead of swiped. I haven’t used it in another country yet.
The websitesays
I’ve read through that description three times, and I can’t see anywhere where it says that the Visa Debit transaction is offline or online. 
Knowing whether a debit charge will take place immediately or will be posted after a couple of days would seem to be an important detail. Maybe your card will work online in some places and offline in others?
I don’t know. For now, it seems to work exactly the same way as before in Canada, so that’s good enough for me.
Can someone explain to me what this does? I read the Wikipedia page but all I gathered from it was “you have to enter a correct PIN.” How is it different than normal debit cards with which you must also enter the correct PIN?
Well, just a heads-up if you go overseas and want to use it…
You are being too charitable in assuming that the cc companies will offer a carrot to the vendors. When chip&pin was introduced in Europe, the incentive was a “stick”. Vendors were told that if they did not adopt c&p, the vendor would become liable for any fraud/charge-backs.
I suspect you’re thinking about ATMs. This technology allows the card to be used with its PIN in stores as the entirety of the transaction, rather than swipe-and-sign. We’ve had them for about 10 years.
Yeah, that’s how a debit card works. You swipe and enter your PIN. At stores.
As far as physically using a chip and pin card goes, it’s basically the same as a debit card without it. You stick the card in a reader until the transaction is done and enter your PIN. But it’s more secure because the chip encodes your PIN and whatever you type in has to match or it gets declined. It’s more protection from your card being cloned, I think, since you supposedly can’t copy the information on the chip, even if you copy the info off the magnetic strip.
For the person using the debit card, though, it’s not effectively any different aside from having several new exciting ways to screw up how you put your card into the reader.
In Britain I use my C&P debit card online in very much the same way that I would use a credit card: i.e., I enter a bunch of numbers, that are on the card, into the web form. It is not easier or more secure than a credit card, in this situation, but it is not harder or less secure either.
I still don’t see how it’s more secure. Since you have the chip with you, and its data is apparently changeable (seeing as you can change your PIN), that means the data should be relatively easy to read and crack, compared to having the number stored somewhere else, and only getting a yes or no answer when you use the equipment.
It seems that whatever security method you used on site would be better if used offsite.
