Reverse that. The US has always had online terminals because we didn't get EMV initially. Taking impressions and filling out charge slips was 'online' (call the

Reverse that. The US has always had online terminals because we didn't get EMV initially. Taking impressions and filling out charge slips was 'online' (call the auth center,) swipe transactions were online, and then we just do EMV online too since every credit card terminal in the country was already online. In Europe where EMV was first introduced, offline transaction processing was extremely common because there had been no reason to put terminals online prior to the EMV rollout and merchants did what merchants do and whined about the cost of acquiring telecom, so offline mode was required in Europe. I have literally never seen a fully offline transaction in the US (in fact, very few US cards even ship the certs necessary to conduct offline transactions), but several of them in Europe and the UK as recently as last year.