3 ms·
Tap-to-pay and chip cards all use the same standard, EMV. Most of the problems with chip cards in the US are because of incredibly slow terminals or application
by snuxoll 10y ago
Tap-to-pay and chip cards all use the same standard, EMV. Most of the problems with chip cards in the US are because of incredibly slow terminals or applications on the smart card themselves. Since the terminals are much faster dealing with tap-to-pay I'm guessing their either just take forever to initialize the smart card, or it's the latter issue (application on the card itself).
I'm curious as to the experience of people taking EMV cards from the US to Europe, is it any faster than in the states on the same terminal hardware?
- Veratyr 10y agoI've taken US credit cards to Europe (and soon Australia) and yes, they're noticeably faster there, even with the insert + PIN process.
- snuxoll 10y agoSo that leaves the bottleneck on either the merchant bank, the US card networks, the payment terminal or the retailers internet connection. Still a crapshoot to figure out where the latency comes from, but at least it's not the cards or the issuing banks.
- Veratyr 10y agoMy assumption is that it's the payment terminals. The US tends to have far more dated/low end terminals than I've seen elsewhere. I have a feeling that since retailers are forced to upgrade, they choose the cheapest, most terrible option they can.
- niftich 10y agoI'm not so sure most of the fault lies with the terminals. In April 2016, Visa announced a software/firmware update to card terminals to speed up the awkward waits affecting chip cards [1]. But to your point I found chip terminal manufactuer that claims to have optimized the communications between the chip and the terminal [2]. [1] http://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Speeds-Up-Checkout-Times/default.aspx http://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Speeds-... [2] https://cayan.com/insights/emv-doesn-t-have-to-slow-down-the-cx https://cayan.com/insights/emv-doesn-t-have-to-slow-down-the...