17 ms·

Are there any Americans here who are able to explain why the US is so backwards when compared to European countries? Visa and Mastercard and the banks all offe

by elthran 10y ago

Are there any Americans here who are able to explain why the US is so backwards when compared to European countries? Visa and Mastercard and the banks all offer Chip and Pin services here in the UK, and have done for years. I can understand the delay in adopting chip cards, with the ridiculously large number of terminals and cards that would have to be replaced - but I really don't see why when you're performing the migration to cards with a chip, you wouldn't implement PIN at the same time

mikeash 10y ago
Credit cards compete with other forms of payment, like cash. Making credit cards harder to use makes people shift payments to other forms. Implementing PINs is about balancing the costs of fraud against the costs of shifting those payments. If you cut fraud by X but you lose out on Y > X revenue due to reduced credit card use, it's a net loss. Card companies here apparently think that Y is indeed greater than X.
- hx87 10y ago
  Honestly though I'd rather enter a PIN than use a dull piece of plastic to make an unreadable signature on a feedbackless screen. I punch keys all day but rarely write by hand.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    I think you're unusual. Many people struggle with PINs, or at least think they would, which in terms of hurting credit card use amounts to the same thing. Another issue is that PIN adoption often implies a liability shift. Right now I have zero liability for fraudulent uses of my credit card. Some places place liability on the cardholder if the cardholder didn't take sufficient care to protect their PIN and a fraudulent transaction is made with the PIN. If that happened, I would stop using credit cards unless it was absolutely necessary, and the mere possibility is enough to make me extremely skeptical of any move to require PINs. By the way, there is no requirement for your signature to be readable or reproducible or even anything resembling your name. Just do a quick freehand scribble. There's no reason for it to be harder than entering a PIN.
    - hx87 10y ago
      With the vast majority of chip and pin schemes the liability for fraudulent transactions still falls on the bank, unless the merchant/processor hasn't implemented chip and pin, in which case it falls on them.
      - mikeash 10y ago
        When I think of "chip and PIN" my first thought is of the UK for some reason, and the UK is one of those that tries to put some liability on the cardholder. In the US, our experience with PINs is mostly around debit cards. Those have significantly weaker fraud protections for debit transactions with a stolen PIN, up to $500 if you don't notice the fraud until after two days, and unlimited if you manage to miss it for two months.
    - stephengillie 10y ago
      If signatures don't have to match a previous signature, then what is the point of entering the scribble in the first place? Aren't signatures still used as nominal security verification? If not, what is the legal significance of "signing" a document?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - mikeash 10y ago
        It used to be a security thing, but that seems to have completely fallen by the wayside. I think these days it's basically just formally indicating that you're agreeing to make the purchase at hand, so you can't later go back and say that you somehow didn't realize you were handing over money, or that you thought you were paying less than you were charged.
      - btkramer9 10y ago
        I find signing these days utterly pointless. I literally draw a line on every signature asked for these days.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  What about contactless? PayPass/PayWave/Apple Pay is accepted universally here in Australia. Doesn't that make it easier for customers to pay?
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Yes, I'm not sure why it's slow in catching on here. We've had contactless payments for years (I had a card that supported it around 2008) but they're still not common. I suspect that one is more of a chicken-and-egg problem, with merchants not really caring to adopt it as long as few people have the cards, and card issuers not really caring to issue them as long as few merchants accept them. But I don't really know.
- acangiano 10y ago
  In Canada, we have a good compromise. Up to $100 (depending on your bank) you can simply use RFID "touch" payments. Fraud is much higher but it increases credit card usage so credit card companies promote it heavily (after all, the possible fraud will be for very small amounts). For larger purchases, a PIN is required. I think it's a good system. When I travel to the US I'm always surprised by how backwards the approach to credit cards is: - Waiter grabs my card and walks away with it. (In Canada they'd bring you the machine to your table.) - In the unlikely scenario that they actually place the card in the chip reader, as opposed to just swiping it, they usually come back to me with a puzzled face. Last time I had the following interaction, "Sir, your card is giving us an error". "What's the error?". "It wants a code". "OK, I'll come and enter it". Then waiter proceeds to ask me for id, inspecting my card, checking the signature on the back carefully, etc. Basically, he thought I was up to no good because my card has a PIN. :)
  - wvenable 10y ago
    > Fraud is much higher Is it? From what I understand they basically use their fraud-detection algorithms to determine whether the transaction should go through. That's why, every so often, the tap will fail and you have to do chip & pin. I once had a chip&pin transaction refuse to go through because I was out of town and used a gas station brand that I almost never use. I called the CC company and they said pretty much that was reason. They monitor all transactions for behaviors out of the norm.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    I really enjoyed all the wireless handheld CC terminals in Canada where the transaction felt like I was doing the work, and at my own pace. Much nicer than restaurants here as you describe.
  - nickonline 10y ago
    Credit card fraud is the highest in the US compared to any country in the world. Probably because it is so easy to swipe someone's wallet and then go on a spending spree without having to know a second detail.
- seanalltogether 10y ago
  I believe the crux of the lawsuit (and oddly isn't really covered in the article) is that the credit card companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Visa & MC have created a new system that is only marginally more secure, but have required retailers to now shoulder the costs of any fraud that occurs on those new cards.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    If they'd just adopt chip readers then liability stays with the card companies. This is actually something that has really puzzled me about the American chip rollout. As of October 2015, any merchant without a chip reader bears full liability for fraudulent chargers. I was sure that this would mean everybody would be switched over on time. Forcing merchants to pay for fraud is a pretty big threat! And yet here we are most of a year later, and I still see tons of stores with no chip readers. Even weirder, I see tons of stores with chip readers that don't work because they haven't activated it on the backend. Why....
bradleyjg 10y ago
American consumers aren't responsible for fraud on their credit cards (technically only up $50 or something but in practice not at all). That means that they don't care much about security as compared to the inconvenience of having to remember and use a PIN.
- function_seven 10y ago
  All the more reason for the credit card companies to insist on implementing PINs, right? Since they're the ones eating the fraud.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    No, it's the merchant that eats the cost, they have to return the money from the fraudulent payment.
    - function_seven 10y ago
      Ah, good point. I guess this circles back to Home Depot's complaint then. All the merchants would have to band together somehow to insist on Chip-and-PIN.
- germanier 10y ago
  That can't be the reason for the difference because (roughly) the same applies to the European market.
rogerbinns 10y ago
(I'm a brit who moved to the US.) It is far more common for people to have multiple cards. There are also a lot of affinity cards - associated with airlines, stores, sports teams etc. A random site[1] claims just under 4 cards on average for those who have any cards. A card issuer also requiring that the consumer remember yet another PIN isn't going to find it too useful for expanding their business, just as the consumer is going to prefer less hassle. [1] http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/ownership-statistics-charts-1276.php http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/ownership-statis...
- elthran 10y ago
  Those stats made quite interesting reading - what I felt is missing is the reason /why/ there is such a high multiple-card ownership rate? I personally have a single debit card, and a single credit card, as do most people I know - is the culture in the US really so different that people need so many cards? I've visited the US, but do not live there - I never felt properly safe when I was just swiping my card and signing to pay for things. I don't even know if the fraud protection would apply to my European chip and pin card if I paid for things that way.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Single debit card, yes. But many people, including myself, have multiple credit cards for various reasons. (Backup in case of loss/rejection due to anti-fraud error, various types of affinity card rewards that want to spread around for various reasons, etc.) Also, to the degree that many still have AMEX cards, those aren't as widely accepted as Visa/Mastercard.
  - jamesroseman 10y ago
    One American's opinion. I'm in my early 20s and in good financial standing, I have 3 credit cards with airline miles programs. Using them means for the past year I've used a free flight every 3rd flight, and my girlfriend and I will be traveling to Europe RT for $1200 for 2 tickets. I fly a lot, and it's saved me a couple hundred dollars to have a few credit cards, and the inconvenience of keeping < 5% balance on each. I'd imagine it's because the credit card companies have less restrictions on what they can do here compared to Europe, so they can afford more extravagant offerings.
wahsd 10y ago
That's just nonsense. It's really not backwards at all. There are extensive system integration issues due to our markets' diversity. With dynamism and diversity often come a whole heap of challenges that simpler and more basic systems simply don't have to deal with. I also feel like we have been light-years ahead of Europe in particular when it comes to fraud detection and consumer protections that have also not made it all that urgent of a matter. Sure it's from a couple years ago, but that has never really been an issue in the USA, even if recovering stolen funds was a hassle in the past. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/may/04/banks-pin-card-fraud https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/may/04/banks-pin-card... In many ways we are also even technologically advancing far more as we adopt Apple Pay, which uses your fingerprint and various security layers to authenticate your card. I get the sense that your perspective about "backwards" is really more about self-perceived European sense of grandeur than reality. I suspect if you look at the exponentially larger number of card transactions we process in the USA, the fraud issue is really not that big of an issue even with magnetic strips, so there's really no rush. Also, considering that Europe still uses hard cash (for many laudable reasons) also needs to factor into your sense of being "backwards". We will all rue that day that cash is fully replaced by systems that are and will be fully monitored and inherently vulnerable to being compromised, but I'm not going to call Europe "backwards" for it. Euro-smug, "by the measure of how we do it you are backwards" is not all that flattering.
Perceval 10y ago
Here is a good article explaining U.S. path dependence on a clearing/settlement infrastructure that's stuck in the 1970s: http://priceonomics.com/how-credit-cards-tax-america/ http://priceonomics.com/how-credit-cards-tax-america/
tdicola 10y ago
The US is much larger than individual European countries and has an order of magnitude more credit card readers, etc. in circulation. Every single one of those had to be updated to use the new system.
- germanier 10y ago
  I don't know why you would need to activate them all on the same day (and in fact that did neither happen in the US nor anywhere in Europe). An incremental rollout is always possible and the size of a market does not change anything about that. My European credit card still works with legacy systems deployed somewhere in the world that hadn't been updated. That doesn't change the benefits they got from updating most system here. Incidentally, the large schemes usually set Europe-wide rules anyway.
- hackuser 10y ago
  The US therefore loses the economy of scale. Also, the US didn't even start before the tech had already been deployed across Europe.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    Partly that's because the US banks didn't think the EU standard was secure enough. They were proven somewhat right when a fraud ring found a way to bypass some of the authentication[1]. Long story made short: The EU system did something like authorizing the pin to the card using the chip, but not requiring the bank to authenticate, which allowed the terminals to function without a network connection. Criminals inserted the chip from one card over the chip from another, intercepting the pin authentication request to the card and allowing it, and then allowing the transaction to proceed against the regular card. This would not work in the US where all the requests are verified by the bank over the network (which is why it takes longer). That the US card industry is trying to move away from requiring a pin is somewhat strange, but I think can be explained by different people weighing in at different stages. Engineers nixed the EU type system as not secure enough, and then different company decision makers start pushing for no pin, to make sure they don't see a dip in usage. What you end up with is this. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10414375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10414375
Johnny555 10y ago
The lawsuit explains it, I never bought the "Americans are too dumb to remember a PIN" excuse, and it turns out that it's about the money -- PIN transactions cost less than signature transactions so Visa/MC want more signature transactions: The banks collect higher merchant fees for signature-based credit-card transactions than PIN-based ones. “While chip-and-PIN authentication is proven to be more secure, it is less profitable for Visa, MasterCard, and their member banks and it provides a greater threat to their market dominance,” the lawsuit claimed.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  U.S. chip cards ≠ chip and PIN. For the majority of them, we aren't issued pins and it's not even an option.
- Slump 10y ago
  This is closer to the core issue in my opinion. Wal-Mart and Home Depot do not want to support processing EMV Debit cards as credit. Most debit processing rails require PIN data to process the transaction. Running a debit card using the signature CVM means processing the transaction over credit networks which costs the retailer more and is more profitable for the issuers. This is the main reason retailers want to use Chip and PIN all the time and drop signature. It would mean they could simply run debit transactions over debit rails all the time which would cost them less. Obviously the issuers want the opposite since processing over debit rails is less profitable for them.
tedmiston 10y ago
> ridiculously large number of terminals and cards that would have to be replaced I've heard from some Canadians running a payment processing company that it was the U.S. credit card companies lobbying for decades against it for precisely this expense. Right nextdoor in Canada they've had chipped cards for over a decade.
duaneb 10y ago
Does the Chip and Pin really afford that much protection? Surely it doesn't help with the underlying payment network, i.e. internet payments. The only thing that would really help here would be something like a credit card 2fa required for all transactions (which, to my understanding, the chip provides).
rhino369 10y ago
Traditionally Europe had higher fraud rates than America. So the cost to benefit calculus was different. A lot of retailers still don't think it's worth the hassle.

by elthran 10y ago

mikeash 10y ago

Credit cards compete with other forms of payment, like cash. Making credit cards harder to use makes people shift payments to other forms. Implementing PINs is about balancing the costs of fraud against the costs of shifting those payments. If you cut fraud by X but you lose out on Y > X revenue due to reduced credit card use, it's a net loss. Card companies here apparently think that Y is indeed greater than X.

hx87 10y ago
Honestly though I'd rather enter a PIN than use a dull piece of plastic to make an unreadable signature on a feedbackless screen. I punch keys all day but rarely write by hand.
- mikeash 10y ago
  I think you're unusual. Many people struggle with PINs, or at least think they would, which in terms of hurting credit card use amounts to the same thing. Another issue is that PIN adoption often implies a liability shift. Right now I have zero liability for fraudulent uses of my credit card. Some places place liability on the cardholder if the cardholder didn't take sufficient care to protect their PIN and a fraudulent transaction is made with the PIN. If that happened, I would stop using credit cards unless it was absolutely necessary, and the mere possibility is enough to make me extremely skeptical of any move to require PINs. By the way, there is no requirement for your signature to be readable or reproducible or even anything resembling your name. Just do a quick freehand scribble. There's no reason for it to be harder than entering a PIN.
  - hx87 10y ago
    With the vast majority of chip and pin schemes the liability for fraudulent transactions still falls on the bank, unless the merchant/processor hasn't implemented chip and pin, in which case it falls on them.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      When I think of "chip and PIN" my first thought is of the UK for some reason, and the UK is one of those that tries to put some liability on the cardholder. In the US, our experience with PINs is mostly around debit cards. Those have significantly weaker fraud protections for debit transactions with a stolen PIN, up to $500 if you don't notice the fraud until after two days, and unlimited if you manage to miss it for two months.
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    If signatures don't have to match a previous signature, then what is the point of entering the scribble in the first place? Aren't signatures still used as nominal security verification? If not, what is the legal significance of "signing" a document?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - mikeash 10y ago
      It used to be a security thing, but that seems to have completely fallen by the wayside. I think these days it's basically just formally indicating that you're agreeing to make the purchase at hand, so you can't later go back and say that you somehow didn't realize you were handing over money, or that you thought you were paying less than you were charged.
    - btkramer9 10y ago
      I find signing these days utterly pointless. I literally draw a line on every signature asked for these days.
madeofpalk 10y ago
What about contactless? PayPass/PayWave/Apple Pay is accepted universally here in Australia. Doesn't that make it easier for customers to pay?
- mikeash 10y ago
  Yes, I'm not sure why it's slow in catching on here. We've had contactless payments for years (I had a card that supported it around 2008) but they're still not common. I suspect that one is more of a chicken-and-egg problem, with merchants not really caring to adopt it as long as few people have the cards, and card issuers not really caring to issue them as long as few merchants accept them. But I don't really know.
acangiano 10y ago
In Canada, we have a good compromise. Up to $100 (depending on your bank) you can simply use RFID "touch" payments. Fraud is much higher but it increases credit card usage so credit card companies promote it heavily (after all, the possible fraud will be for very small amounts). For larger purchases, a PIN is required. I think it's a good system. When I travel to the US I'm always surprised by how backwards the approach to credit cards is: - Waiter grabs my card and walks away with it. (In Canada they'd bring you the machine to your table.) - In the unlikely scenario that they actually place the card in the chip reader, as opposed to just swiping it, they usually come back to me with a puzzled face. Last time I had the following interaction, "Sir, your card is giving us an error". "What's the error?". "It wants a code". "OK, I'll come and enter it". Then waiter proceeds to ask me for id, inspecting my card, checking the signature on the back carefully, etc. Basically, he thought I was up to no good because my card has a PIN. :)
- wvenable 10y ago
  > Fraud is much higher Is it? From what I understand they basically use their fraud-detection algorithms to determine whether the transaction should go through. That's why, every so often, the tap will fail and you have to do chip & pin. I once had a chip&pin transaction refuse to go through because I was out of town and used a gas station brand that I almost never use. I called the CC company and they said pretty much that was reason. They monitor all transactions for behaviors out of the norm.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  I really enjoyed all the wireless handheld CC terminals in Canada where the transaction felt like I was doing the work, and at my own pace. Much nicer than restaurants here as you describe.
- nickonline 10y ago
  Credit card fraud is the highest in the US compared to any country in the world. Probably because it is so easy to swipe someone's wallet and then go on a spending spree without having to know a second detail.
seanalltogether 10y ago
I believe the crux of the lawsuit (and oddly isn't really covered in the article) is that the credit card companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Visa & MC have created a new system that is only marginally more secure, but have required retailers to now shoulder the costs of any fraud that occurs on those new cards.
- mikeash 10y ago
  If they'd just adopt chip readers then liability stays with the card companies. This is actually something that has really puzzled me about the American chip rollout. As of October 2015, any merchant without a chip reader bears full liability for fraudulent chargers. I was sure that this would mean everybody would be switched over on time. Forcing merchants to pay for fraud is a pretty big threat! And yet here we are most of a year later, and I still see tons of stores with no chip readers. Even weirder, I see tons of stores with chip readers that don't work because they haven't activated it on the backend. Why....

bradleyjg 10y ago

American consumers aren't responsible for fraud on their credit cards (technically only up $50 or something but in practice not at all). That means that they don't care much about security as compared to the inconvenience of having to remember and use a PIN.

function_seven 10y ago
All the more reason for the credit card companies to insist on implementing PINs, right? Since they're the ones eating the fraud.
- icebraining 10y ago
  No, it's the merchant that eats the cost, they have to return the money from the fraudulent payment.
  - function_seven 10y ago
    Ah, good point. I guess this circles back to Home Depot's complaint then. All the merchants would have to band together somehow to insist on Chip-and-PIN.
germanier 10y ago
That can't be the reason for the difference because (roughly) the same applies to the European market.

rogerbinns 10y ago

(I'm a brit who moved to the US.) It is far more common for people to have multiple cards. There are also a lot of affinity cards - associated with airlines, stores, sports teams etc. A random site[1] claims just under 4 cards on average for those who have any cards. A card issuer also requiring that the consumer remember yet another PIN isn't going to find it too useful for expanding their business, just as the consumer is going to prefer less hassle. [1] http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/ownership-statistics-charts-1276.php http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/ownership-statis...

elthran 10y ago
Those stats made quite interesting reading - what I felt is missing is the reason /why/ there is such a high multiple-card ownership rate? I personally have a single debit card, and a single credit card, as do most people I know - is the culture in the US really so different that people need so many cards? I've visited the US, but do not live there - I never felt properly safe when I was just swiping my card and signing to pay for things. I don't even know if the fraud protection would apply to my European chip and pin card if I paid for things that way.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Single debit card, yes. But many people, including myself, have multiple credit cards for various reasons. (Backup in case of loss/rejection due to anti-fraud error, various types of affinity card rewards that want to spread around for various reasons, etc.) Also, to the degree that many still have AMEX cards, those aren't as widely accepted as Visa/Mastercard.
- jamesroseman 10y ago
  One American's opinion. I'm in my early 20s and in good financial standing, I have 3 credit cards with airline miles programs. Using them means for the past year I've used a free flight every 3rd flight, and my girlfriend and I will be traveling to Europe RT for $1200 for 2 tickets. I fly a lot, and it's saved me a couple hundred dollars to have a few credit cards, and the inconvenience of keeping < 5% balance on each. I'd imagine it's because the credit card companies have less restrictions on what they can do here compared to Europe, so they can afford more extravagant offerings.

wahsd 10y ago

That's just nonsense. It's really not backwards at all. There are extensive system integration issues due to our markets' diversity. With dynamism and diversity often come a whole heap of challenges that simpler and more basic systems simply don't have to deal with. I also feel like we have been light-years ahead of Europe in particular when it comes to fraud detection and consumer protections that have also not made it all that urgent of a matter. Sure it's from a couple years ago, but that has never really been an issue in the USA, even if recovering stolen funds was a hassle in the past. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/may/04/banks-pin-card-fraud https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/may/04/banks-pin-card... In many ways we are also even technologically advancing far more as we adopt Apple Pay, which uses your fingerprint and various security layers to authenticate your card. I get the sense that your perspective about "backwards" is really more about self-perceived European sense of grandeur than reality. I suspect if you look at the exponentially larger number of card transactions we process in the USA, the fraud issue is really not that big of an issue even with magnetic strips, so there's really no rush. Also, considering that Europe still uses hard cash (for many laudable reasons) also needs to factor into your sense of being "backwards". We will all rue that day that cash is fully replaced by systems that are and will be fully monitored and inherently vulnerable to being compromised, but I'm not going to call Europe "backwards" for it. Euro-smug, "by the measure of how we do it you are backwards" is not all that flattering.

Perceval 10y ago

Here is a good article explaining U.S. path dependence on a clearing/settlement infrastructure that's stuck in the 1970s: http://priceonomics.com/how-credit-cards-tax-america/ http://priceonomics.com/how-credit-cards-tax-america/

tdicola 10y ago

The US is much larger than individual European countries and has an order of magnitude more credit card readers, etc. in circulation. Every single one of those had to be updated to use the new system.

germanier 10y ago
I don't know why you would need to activate them all on the same day (and in fact that did neither happen in the US nor anywhere in Europe). An incremental rollout is always possible and the size of a market does not change anything about that. My European credit card still works with legacy systems deployed somewhere in the world that hadn't been updated. That doesn't change the benefits they got from updating most system here. Incidentally, the large schemes usually set Europe-wide rules anyway.
hackuser 10y ago
The US therefore loses the economy of scale. Also, the US didn't even start before the tech had already been deployed across Europe.
- kbenson 10y ago
  Partly that's because the US banks didn't think the EU standard was secure enough. They were proven somewhat right when a fraud ring found a way to bypass some of the authentication[1]. Long story made short: The EU system did something like authorizing the pin to the card using the chip, but not requiring the bank to authenticate, which allowed the terminals to function without a network connection. Criminals inserted the chip from one card over the chip from another, intercepting the pin authentication request to the card and allowing it, and then allowing the transaction to proceed against the regular card. This would not work in the US where all the requests are verified by the bank over the network (which is why it takes longer). That the US card industry is trying to move away from requiring a pin is somewhat strange, but I think can be explained by different people weighing in at different stages. Engineers nixed the EU type system as not secure enough, and then different company decision makers start pushing for no pin, to make sure they don't see a dip in usage. What you end up with is this. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10414375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10414375

Johnny555 10y ago

The lawsuit explains it, I never bought the "Americans are too dumb to remember a PIN" excuse, and it turns out that it's about the money -- PIN transactions cost less than signature transactions so Visa/MC want more signature transactions: The banks collect higher merchant fees for signature-based credit-card transactions than PIN-based ones. “While chip-and-PIN authentication is proven to be more secure, it is less profitable for Visa, MasterCard, and their member banks and it provides a greater threat to their market dominance,” the lawsuit claimed.

tedmiston 10y ago
U.S. chip cards ≠ chip and PIN. For the majority of them, we aren't issued pins and it's not even an option.
Slump 10y ago
This is closer to the core issue in my opinion. Wal-Mart and Home Depot do not want to support processing EMV Debit cards as credit. Most debit processing rails require PIN data to process the transaction. Running a debit card using the signature CVM means processing the transaction over credit networks which costs the retailer more and is more profitable for the issuers. This is the main reason retailers want to use Chip and PIN all the time and drop signature. It would mean they could simply run debit transactions over debit rails all the time which would cost them less. Obviously the issuers want the opposite since processing over debit rails is less profitable for them.

tedmiston 10y ago

> ridiculously large number of terminals and cards that would have to be replaced I've heard from some Canadians running a payment processing company that it was the U.S. credit card companies lobbying for decades against it for precisely this expense. Right nextdoor in Canada they've had chipped cards for over a decade.

duaneb 10y ago

Does the Chip and Pin really afford that much protection? Surely it doesn't help with the underlying payment network, i.e. internet payments. The only thing that would really help here would be something like a credit card 2fa required for all transactions (which, to my understanding, the chip provides).

rhino369 10y ago

Traditionally Europe had higher fraud rates than America. So the cost to benefit calculus was different. A lot of retailers still don't think it's worth the hassle.