ISTM that in the effort to create a single POS system that would still work for old-style swipe+sign credit, swipe+PIN debit, chip, NFC and Og knows what else, they found themselves having to add a whole bunch of extra steps in order to tell one from the other, rather than blackboxing that part. And that would be a bigger issue with American consumers, who are less likely to just sit there quietly in the face of “This is the new way to do things from now on, and that’s that.”
That is not an explanation at all, because as far as I know everyone posting to this message board and others where I’ve seen ‘why haven’t we moved to chip’ laments is an end-user, none of the credit card issuers are posting to message boards (other than maybe their own). How much credit card issuers worry about security is a business decision for them and isn’t really relevant, what confuses me is the people (that is, end-users) who complain about how we’re not on chip systems yet and how far behind Europe we are because of it. Like you said, end-users aren’t liable for fraud.
This is speculation, so take it for what it is.
I suspect some of it is Euro-types and Euro-philes sniffing at American backwardness, right up there with reactionary politics and clinging to outdated measurements systems.
Some may be perfectly valid impatience of folks who have experienced how well (smoothly, quickly) actual chip-and-PIN business goes in Europe, compared to the backward, inconsistent, and slothful implementations available here. A well-designed and well-implemented smart card system is actually quicker and easier to use than swipe-and-sign, but that wouldn’t be apparent at all looking at most of the offerings available here.
In Europe, with Chip and Pin, can you sign? The way it’s set up, from the consumer’s stand point, they don’t see the safeguards that are in place. For years I’ve been saying that I’d love to have a card a credit card that only worked with a Pin. If you didn’t enter your pin, it declined.
Of course, with people having multiple cards, multiple pins, having to change their pins n a regular basis, sooner or later they’ll start writing them down. But at least it’s safer than just being able to swipe the card and, more or less, knowing the sale will go through and cardholders will understand how it’s safer.
With our system at work you can insert your chip card at any time, although if you do it early you’re risking that the transaction is going to go through before I’m done ringing up your order (we aren’t quite sure why that happens sometimes). Once it goes past a certain point I can’t stop it, regardless.
You still have to leave your chip card inserted until the transaction is completed, you can’t just insert it, withdraw it, and have it work.
Technically in the UK it’s at the vendor’s discretion but IME they all refuse. No PIN means that they are liable for the transaction.
my experience in Canada is that if you use the Chip and pin, there is no need for a signature. It’s only if you use the swipe that you then have to sign something, which added to the length of time for the swipe process.
As well, if the purchase is under the tap limit, you don’t even have to enter a pin; just tap your card and if it’s accepted, that’s it, done. (Not all merchants have the tap option yet, but high-traffic places like Tim’s and gas stations do.)
Question: can you use the swipe option for your credit cards at gas pumps without going in, or do you have to go in to sign the receipt? Here, you can use chip and Pin at the pump and never have to go in.
You don’t have to go in. You usually have to enter your zip code, though. This can be problematic for foreign visitors.
The gas station across the border in the USA that is closest to me has a unique and wondrous procedure: use a chip credit cart (not a chip debit card – which is a good thing considering that credit cards usually have better liability protection than debit cards) at the pump, and then walk over to the grocery store and wait in line with the shoppers for the receipt, for they do not properly maintain their pumps.
The first time I learned about tap was when I had my personal car and my business card in my hand while making two separate transactions (one personal and one business) at a gas station. Without knowing it, I paid the business transaction with my personal card, and then asked why the machine was not accepting my business card. The clerk looked at my like I was stupid, which, I suppose, I was.
Your comment may be speculation, but it’s pretty solid speculation.
I’m one of those people, and you’re right: I’m an unabashed europhile and I lived in France for a year (1999-2000) and I long for the seamless aspect of credit card transactions in Europe. (I also miss high-speed rail, sane bicycle traffic management and single-payer health care. I’m totally living the liberal-elite cliché!)
I used to work in network security, and as a result the American fixation on security theater drives me nuts. The whole chip-and-sign thing is a joke compared to chip-and-pin. It’s not that chip-and-pin is utterly secure; it’s that “chip-and-sign” is really just “chip” and therefore utterly insecure. The signature doesn’t help secure the transaction at all.
The kinds of authorization credentials are classically broken down into three categories: things you have (like a card, chip or regular) things you know (like a PIN) and things you are (usually biometrics like fingerprint or iris scanning). Reasonably secure authorization systems require at least two of the three sets of credentials.
Your card is something you have, but it turned out that it was trivial to clone cards via a skimmer. Adding chips to cards made it much harder (but not impossible) to clone them.
A PIN is a reasonable choice from the “something you know” category. People treat a signature like it also falls into the “something you know” category, but it really doesn’t. It’s frequently not checked and easily forged or replaced.
So “chip-and-pin” requires something you have and something you know. But “chip-and-signature” really only requires something you have. Again, a good auth mechanism requires at least two factors, but we’ve effectively chosen single-factor authentication for our “new” credit cards. And as others have pointed out, chip cards are only new to us; they’ve been used worldwide (except for the US) for decades.
When I get a new card, I often forget to sign it. Most clerks don’t check or check but don’t care. The few who both check and object are often completely placated when I sign the card in front of them. Some of them even proceed to compare my signature on the card I just signed in front of them to my signature on the receipt I just signed in front of them. And really, why is it a minimum-wage and barely-trained retail clerk’s job to be the primary bulwark against credit card fraud?
If I found a chip card on the street and intended to use it fraudulently, all I need is some rubbing alcohol to remove the signature on the back and apply my own illegible squiggle. I don’t know why Americans think signing a card and/or receipt is somehow proof against fraud; it seems to have something to do with misconceptions about contract law and a Puritan “so help me God” fixation on the idea that one’s word is one’s bond (but now I’m speculating).
Gnoitall has it right: my objections come from both my europhile status and my actual experience in the field. After working in network security, I went to grad school for mechanical engineering, and these things have begun to merge: I find chip-and-sign lame and ugly because it’s a terrible engineering implementation. The theater involved in signing a receipt is confounding to me as an engineer; I recognize that I’m probably a lot more sensitive to it than most. But aside from my pet peeves, I’m baffled by the fact that we have a secure-and-easy option and an insecure-and-easy option, but the merchants, issuers and general public are so excited about the insecure-and-easy option. Why did we collectively choose the less-secure option? My bafflement also comes from my engineering mindset, and I recognize that.
Depending on the details of the transaction, either the merchant or the card issuer are on the hook for fraudulent transactions, but they’re only on the hook for fraudulent transactions that I notice and complain about. I review my credit card bills, but I imagine I’ve missed small fraudulent transactions before. Truly secure transactions would mean I’d sleep a little better without worrying that I had missed something.
The best available option now, at least in my opinion, is Apple Pay/Google Wallet. They’re the same thing; they’re both implementations of near-field communications (NFC) payments. NFC payments are much, much more secure than both chip-and-signature and chip-and-pin.
Transactions up to $50 do not require a signature. Infuriatingly (to me and probably me alone), transactions above $50 require a signature even though the clerk never sees a signed card with which to compare my signature. (This threshold probably depends on both the merchant’s payment processor and my credit card issuer).
This drives me nuts because it’s meaningless: if it’s a legit transaction, I’ve already agreed that I’m on the hook for it, and signing a receipt doesn’t change that; if it’s a fraudulent transaction, it’s not like the perpetrator is any less guilty or liable before he/she signs the receipt. But Americans especially seem to find comfort in the idea that big transactions require signatures, that a signature somehow makes a big transaction real, and that signatures are difficult to forge.
/rant
Bolding mine.
Why would one want a receipt? Especially for a purchase of gasoline? 
Substantially 100% of the receipts I’ve been handed in the last 40 years went directly into the nearest trash can. The very *very * few exceptions were things where I had a pre-existing concern that a return might be needed soon.
One of the points of paying by card is that you’re establishing a purchase record that doesn’t require holding and filing little scraps of paper. They come all neatly itemized and organized once a month on the bill.
What make NFC more secure than chip? Both chip and NFC are doing the same EMV algorithm.
I am a sole proprietor so I maintain separate business and personal accounts. I find it easier to use paper receipts for purchases than to try to guess which entries on the statements are gas entries and which are for something else. When I stop for gas on a road trip, often I will also pick up a snack and soft-drink. For tax purposes I have to separately itemize the drink/snack and gas amounts, so that come tax time I can calculate and deduct the business use portion of my vehicle expenses, and calculate and deduct only a portion of the business trip meals. On single a receipt that includes both types of purchases, I will have the information that I need to do this, whereas on a statement, I will not.
Also, although no longer an issue for gas purchases at almost all most places, I am in the habit of checking receipts at point of purchase, for folks make errors (or at least I sure do): e.g. for a $10.00 transaction, $1.00 or $10.00 might get entered and charged.
Missed edit:
Also, on the statement I often will not have a clue as to what a purchase was for, because often the vendor’s name on the statement will not reflect the name with which I am familiar – for example numbered corporations, or proprietorships that operate under a name that does not reflect the name of the transaction vendor’s account holder. If there are a few of them on a statement, I will not be able to know which ones were for what. Gas, business meals, personal meals? It’s easier to collect receipts rather than write it all out on a note pad, and then enter the transactions in my books with both receipts and statements in hand.
Finally, come audit time, it sure helps to be able to show how much was paid to whom for what. Statements lack the “for what.”
Makes sense; thanks.
I use separate CCs for purchases related to personal vs job vs self-employment. For the vast majority of my particular variety of work purchases it’s pretty obvious what accounting category the “what” is just from the “who”. Once in awhile I get a head scratcher as you say. I would never think to quibble about separating a tank of gas from a cup of coffee bought at the same convenience store. It’s totally de minimis.
I’ve never been audited, but I have to believe that the days of them demanding itemized cash register tapes for everything went out a couple decades ago. If not, I bet they could disallow about/34ths of the legit deductions of about 3/4ths of all businesses in the US for lack of uber-detailed paper-only documentation.
If the IRS schools me different some day I’ll just have take my beating like a man.
Well, not quite. EMV isn’t an encryption algorithm but rather a set of interoperability standards. Some of those standards pertain to encryption, of course. NFC payments from, for example, Apple devices are EMV-compliant, but they are not identical to chip-card EMV transactions.
The big difference, as I understand it, is tokenization and when it happens in the transaction process. (Tokenization is essentially the generation of a one-time code that gets passed to a credit card processor instead of your credit card number, expiration date and other data. It can be thought of as a single-use credit card number).
While the EMV standard can accommodate tokenization, it happens at the terminal (the thing into which you insert your card). That means the data from the chip are hanging out as plaintext on a potentially compromised terminal. (The Target fiasco involved huge numbers of compromised terminals). That said, regardless of whether the terminal is compromised, the merchant can be pretty sure your card is a “real” card.
With Apple Pay, tokenization happens on the Apple device, whether a watch or a phone. The “real number” is never transmitted to the terminal.
With an EMV card, you’re implicitly trusting the terminal. Using Apple’s implementation of NFC payments, you’re explicitly not trusting the terminal.i suppose you’re trusting Apple’s hardware instead. But while I don’t have any control over the terminal, I can at least control physical access to my watch.
The issue is obscured a bit by RFID EMV chip cards, which allow wireless-but-otherwise-standard EMV payments (tokenized on the terminal). To be clear, RFID and NFC are very distinct standards.
Also, EMV cards are vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack that allows one to plug a stolen card into an adapter and then enter any PIN at the terminal to complete the transaction:
I no longer work in the security field and haven’t for more than a decade. If I’ve gotten any of this wrong, I’d be grateful to anyone who can correct what I’ve written.
Because when I travel on business for my employer my employer will not reimburse my expenses without all those little slips of paper.
Considering those trips average $200-300 per trip, and I’m a low-income retail drone, that’s too much money to let slide. I dutifully collect all that paper and submit it.
This discussion made me curious, so when I went to Safeway yesterday, I memorized the steps:
-
I hold up card.
-
Cashier says “Debit or credit.”
-
I say “Debit”.
-
She boop-boop–boops the till.
-
Card reader lights up: “Insert card or swipe”
-
I insert card.
-
Prompt on card reader: “Purchase is $XX.XX.”
-
I press “OK”.
-
Card reader prompts: “Cheque or Savings?”
-
I press “Savings”.
-
Card reader prompts: “Enter PIN”
-
I enter PIN.
-
Card reader: “Thank you.”
-
I wait and count; before I reach 5, card reader says: “Transaction completed.”
The only time I was waiting was after entering the PIN. All the other steps were pretty much instantaneous.
Yeah but you cheated. You’re in a country with a First World banking system. 