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I'm visiting the US currently from the UK and am bewildered that signing is still how the majority of transactions are handled. Chip and pin has been the standa

I'm visiting the US currently from the UK and am bewildered that signing is still how the majority of transactions are handled. Chip and pin has been the standard for years at home (and most of the EU, and more). How/why has it taken so long for the US to catch up? It's like going backwards in time... (the NY subway ticket system is similarly archaic!)

mercutio2 9y ago
The US was the originator of credit cards, and the number of merchant deployments here was one or two orders of magnitude bigger than in Europe when EMV was standardized, so the cost to retool was dramatically higher. Next, credit card fraud in the US is currently limited through various Orwellian big data measures, whereas Europe was rife with credit card fraud when EMV was originally deployed, so the cost benefit analysis made it much more appealing in Europe. Basically, path dependency is a thing. Americans routinely use checks to pay rent for similar reasons.
- bradknowles 9y ago
  My wife has to pay her rent at her office via check. The landlord requires it. We were dumbfounded at first, but then we just accepted that we have to play by his rules. Prior to that event, I can’t think of any transaction we have had in decades here in the US where we were required to pay by check. Cards or electronic payments of one sort or another have almost always been available to us.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  But now they've gone through the cost and effort of implementing EMV chips, and they're still not using PINs.
  - mercutio2 9y ago
    PINs require you to remember them, and they aren’t actually required to solve the main fraud problem. The card companies decided Americans would spend less if presented with the hassle; who knows if they were right. Physical credit card theft is a negligible source of fraud, it’s all about card cloning, which EMV does a moderately good job of preventing.
bzbarsky 9y ago
> How/why has it taken so long for the US to catch up? A significant part of this is differences in credit card usage patterns. It's fairly common in the US for people to have a large number of credit cards (think ~10), not least because various stores have their own cards which get you discounts. From what I can tell, other places people have a much smaller number of cards. If a person has 10 cards, and each of those card issuers wants their card to actually be used, the game theory is against them making the person try to remember a PIN to use their card. Even if you posit that they can solve the coordination problem and all agree that they will simul-roll-out a requirement to use a PIN (which is not trivial at all, given lack of widespread support in terminals), they all worry that with 10 PINs to remember the cardholder will just say "screw it" and stick to using only one or two cards, and it won't be theirs. Yes, the cardholder can go through the trouble of changing PINs so they all match. But then you have to gamble on them doing that... So that's one reason issuers haven't been pushing very hard for chip+PIN.

mercutio2 9y ago

The US was the originator of credit cards, and the number of merchant deployments here was one or two orders of magnitude bigger than in Europe when EMV was standardized, so the cost to retool was dramatically higher. Next, credit card fraud in the US is currently limited through various Orwellian big data measures, whereas Europe was rife with credit card fraud when EMV was originally deployed, so the cost benefit analysis made it much more appealing in Europe. Basically, path dependency is a thing. Americans routinely use checks to pay rent for similar reasons.

bradknowles 9y ago
My wife has to pay her rent at her office via check. The landlord requires it. We were dumbfounded at first, but then we just accepted that we have to play by his rules. Prior to that event, I can’t think of any transaction we have had in decades here in the US where we were required to pay by check. Cards or electronic payments of one sort or another have almost always been available to us.
kalleboo 9y ago
But now they've gone through the cost and effort of implementing EMV chips, and they're still not using PINs.
- mercutio2 9y ago
  PINs require you to remember them, and they aren’t actually required to solve the main fraud problem. The card companies decided Americans would spend less if presented with the hassle; who knows if they were right. Physical credit card theft is a negligible source of fraud, it’s all about card cloning, which EMV does a moderately good job of preventing.

bzbarsky 9y ago

> How/why has it taken so long for the US to catch up? A significant part of this is differences in credit card usage patterns. It's fairly common in the US for people to have a large number of credit cards (think ~10), not least because various stores have their own cards which get you discounts. From what I can tell, other places people have a much smaller number of cards. If a person has 10 cards, and each of those card issuers wants their card to actually be used, the game theory is against them making the person try to remember a PIN to use their card. Even if you posit that they can solve the coordination problem and all agree that they will simul-roll-out a requirement to use a PIN (which is not trivial at all, given lack of widespread support in terminals), they all worry that with 10 PINs to remember the cardholder will just say "screw it" and stick to using only one or two cards, and it won't be theirs. Yes, the cardholder can go through the trouble of changing PINs so they all match. But then you have to gamble on them doing that... So that's one reason issuers haven't been pushing very hard for chip+PIN.