American finance and regulators really like paper with ink signatures. I think it's perceived as a lower fraud risk, or easier to nail someone criminally becaus

American finance and regulators really like paper with ink signatures. I think it's perceived as a lower fraud risk, or easier to nail someone criminally because of the paper trail. You can get free settlement on a check under certain thresholds in about a day if you deposit it via an ATM at your bank. You endorse it, stick in the machine, it images the check, does some OCR, and turns it into an electronic transfer. Banks often let you take a picture of it with your phone via an app. It's pretty common now. So that's a lot of infrastructure to support something that seems pretty backwards, but anecdotally works well enough. Ink signatures are just really "sticky" in American commerce, I guess it gives regulators warm fuzzies. As far CC, it's gone largely chip-pin, but signature is a backup if comms goes down. Keep in mind that in the states there's a prevalence of credit vs. debit, and it's pretty lenient to dispute charges as a credit card user, merchants get the short end of the stick there. Cloned CC being used to make phony charges was never something that you were liable for. A bit of a pain to deal with, but not a financial risk. So there's little to drive adoption except merchants and the CCs who want to reduce fraud to increase overall profits.