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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 sta
by 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 agoMy 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 agoBut now they've gone through the cost and effort of implementing EMV chips, and they're still not using PINs.
- mercutio2 9y agoPINs 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.