3 ms·
I've taken US credit cards to Europe (and soon Australia) and yes, they're noticeably faster there, even with the insert + PIN process.
by Veratyr 10y ago
I'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...