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Why does it take so long? Where’s the bottleneck? Where I lived over the last years (two countries in Europe), I don’t even have to use the physical card. I ju

by drclau 5y ago

Why does it take so long? Where’s the bottleneck? Where I lived over the last years (two countries in Europe), I don’t even have to use the physical card. I just use contactless payments with the phone. Prior to that, it was contactless with card. Even ATMs work with contactless (not all, yet). Prior to that, it was chip. I honestly don’t even recall the time when the magnetic stripe was needed. (edit) Think of this: I made an account with one of these neo banks, ordered the card too, and it took me over a year to activate it. I still don’t use it. I just installed the virtual card into the phone’s wallet and used the account like that.

robcohen 5y ago
It really is mind blowing to me. Especially in a pandemic, why why why require a signature for anything? This is one of the few things that would reduce exposure that we already have a technical solution for. I just don’t understand.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  Surfaces don't matter much for covid, it's very unlikely you'll catch it that way.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  As others have said, it doesn't have to be. Much of the world has long moved on from mag stripes and signatures.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Especially in a pandemic, why why why require a signature for anything? This is one of the few things that would reduce exposure that we already have a technical solution for. Turns out infection from surfaces is basically a non-issue. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-hygiene-cleaning-surfaces.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-hygien...
  - dom96 5y ago
    Got any non-paywalled sources handy?
    - gruez 5y ago
      Normally I'd link to archive.is, but they put everything behind a captcha wall, which I'm not keen to solve. You can bypass the paywall with scripts disabled, but the key excerpts are: >But the era of “hygiene theater” may have come to an unofficial end this week, when the C.D.C. updated its surface cleaning guidelines (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/disinfecting-building-facility.html#anchor_1617548426741 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/disinfec...) and noted that the risk of contracting the virus from touching a contaminated surface was less than 1 in 10,000 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-research/surface-transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...). >“People can be affected with the virus that causes Covid-19 through contact with contaminated surfaces and objects,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said at a White House briefing on Monday. “However, evidence has demonstrated that the risk by this route of infection of transmission is actually low.”
  - Johnny555 5y ago
    Coronavirus isn't the only virus to be concerned with, Norovirus is a well known one that can spread through surfaces, which is why it can be so rampant on cruise ships -- and it can live for weeks on surfaces. https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/about/transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/about/transmission.html
    - coldtea 5y ago
      Yes, but microphobia is more annoying than most viruses, and keeping the immune system unprepared due to lack of exposure is potentially fatal, so perhaps they don't want to encourage those...
gruez 5y ago
>I honestly don’t even recall the time when the magnetic strip was needed. for when you fly over to the US and need to use your card
- zz865 5y ago
  Assuming US starts to let people in again.
  - tamaharbor 5y ago
    Use the southern entrance.
  - klipt 5y ago
    There's a specific list of countries you can't travel from. Spend 2 weeks in any country not on that list and you're allowed in.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  The holdouts have long been the gas station fuel pumps. Though that is finally changing at least where I am many stations now support chip and tap card payments.
  - xahrepap 5y ago
    Gas stations around me (Utah) have all replaced their magstripe with a dual magstripe/chip reader. It drives me nuts though, because you still have to insert your card ALL THE WAY IN as if you're using the mag stripe, and then it decides which one to use. Are gas stations not a big target for skimmers? Why didn't they design it to avoid the magstripe-skimmers? have two inserts or something, I don't care. But now we're a FULL generation of gas station pumps away from being free'd from skimmers. I just don't understand. Also, don't get me started on the audio/video ads at the pump these days. They're the worst. I'd rather have to pay inside than have "while you're pumping" ads.
    - jwineinger 5y ago
salamandersauce 5y ago
America. They dragged their heels switching to chips.
- xwdv 5y ago
  More like the security wasn’t necessary due to decreased liabilities.
ddek 5y ago
The only reason I’ve started using my card lately is because Face ID is harder with a mask on.
- drclau 5y ago
  Just in case you have an Apple Watch and weren’t aware, or you plan to get one, there’s this feature that made my life easier: Unlock your iPhone with Apple Watch when you're wearing a face mask https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212208 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212208
  - jdminhbg 5y ago
    This will unlock your phone but not authorize Apple Pay. So the Watch is much more convenient for payments in mask mandate areas. I find it more convenient to tap when unmasked too but that’s more personal preference.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    If you have an Apple Watch, you can just pay with the watch
stingraycharles 5y ago
There’s always that old book shop that doesn’t have the latest and greatest yet. And this type of support is typically enforced by contracts; eg if you buy some device that accepts MasterCard, they promise it will be supported for at least 10 years.
- jmharvey 5y ago
  I've been trying to shift to contactless payments recently, and my anecdotal experience has been the opposite: mom-and-pop shops usually have some kind of terminal from a dedicated payments company (verifone, square, etc) that's been updated in the last few years, while big behemoths (e.g. Lowe's, Fedex, USPS) are the holdouts clinging to bespoke antiquated payments hardware.
aidenn0 5y ago
The USA is a big holdup. I just traveled across the country and there are still filling (petrol) stations where the only card reader is stripe. See also other comments about the stripe being a fallback for chip as chip readers on POS terminals seem to be more fragile than magnetic stripe readers. FWIW, Contactless is very hit-or-miss for me in the US; about 1/3 the time it just doesn't work at all (even with multiple retries), and that's when the terminal has one. Was picking up something at the corner store the other day, realized I didn't have my wallet and contactless just didn't work with the phone at all for some reason.
- anakaine 5y ago
  On your point about contact less being hit-or-miss, this very much goes away when you have a number of options for vendors to choose from on the market, with terminals being supplied mainly by banks who want the business. Both competition and a lack of desire to deal with merchants having issues with the payment system provided lead to increases in reliability. The overseas market has been saturated with chips for 10-15 years, and contact less for 5+, probably notably more.
  - jalk 5y ago
    I have asked in several stores (in Denmark) where contactless doesn’t work, but the terminal has the required hardware - The merchant has to pay a fee to enable contactless. My auto mechanic bitched loudly about it, until I told him he wanted $200 for enabling “daytime running lights” in my rear lights, which is also just “flipping a bit”
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Yea, the Achilles Heel of contactless (or phone/NFC) in the USA is the uncertainty that it's supported and the terrible UX for failure cases. How many times have you had this happen? Your groceries are all rung up and the POS terminal is waiting. You dig out your phone or contactless card and try to invoke the contactless payment system. Nothing's happening. You wave it around a little. Still nothing. Grocery cashier is looking at you like you're an idiot nerd, saying "That thing doesn't work. Just stick the card in the slot." Now I dig in my wallet looking for my chip card as the whole line behind me huffs about how much of a moron I am. Stick it in the POS terminal, and it waits... and waits... and waits... and finally, loudly proclaims BONK BONK BONK transaction approved. Everyone other than me is saying "Finally, we can move on". Contrast that with mag swipe: Pull out the card. Swipe it (which takes 500ms). Done.
poopypoopington 5y ago
To play devil's advocate – who cares? We've had magnetic strips for decades and they work fine. Yes, they're insecure but anti-fraud measures taken by the bank can mitigate that. If this helps more stores accept payments without having a painful transition isn't that worth it? I use Apple Pay most places but I don't mind having to use a strip once in a while or if others do.
- Johnie 5y ago
  Think about who is paying for that fraud. Prior to EMV liability shift, Banks paid for the fraud. After Liability Shift, merchants are paying for fraud using magstripe. Merchants don't want to be responsible for the fraud, so they are incentivized to get rid of the mag stripe.
  - xattt 5y ago
    I really doubt that banks will pass on the savings onto the consumer of fraud mitigation once EMV is fully implemented.
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      Who cares? Just taking the profits away from criminals would be good enough.
    - hocuspocus 5y ago
      Force them. The EU has successfully capped interchange fees in 4-party schemes.
  - syshum 5y ago
    Depends on the transaction, but merchants can absolutely be liable for fraud before the EMV shift... Also the rate of mag fraud is still pretty low, more Online Fraud which was ALWAYS liable to the merchant and did not see to do much ti incentivize any changes there. Causing 90% of your customers pain to save less than 1% on fraud is likely going to cost merchants more than just paying for the fraud, which is also the math online merchants used. Online merchants that have huge fraud prevention lost more customers than the fraud.... Hell I remember one time a online merchant wanted me to submit more info after the sale for anti-fraud... I cancelled the order and bought from someone else
bpodgursky 5y ago
I heard that gas station pumps were a big blocker for a while.
siruncledrew 5y ago
I think the merchants are the bottleneck in this case
djhworld 5y ago
> I honestly don’t even recall the time when the magnetic stripe was needed. Every time I've been to the US it's still magnetic stripe in places like restaurants/bars where the wait staff whisk your card away and then 4 days later the charge ends up appearing on your card. I saw chip and pin (or sometimes the odd chip and sign) appearing in the big shops/chains like walgreens though so I guess it's slowly changing. It felt a bit like what the UK was like 15-20 years ago.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mullen 5y ago
  The Pandemic has really changed how credit cards are handled here. Pre-Pandemic, Tap and Pay was fairly rare, but now, it is everywhere (Nearly 90% by my informal count). The odd thing I noticed is that the smaller the market, the more likely the store/shop uses Tap and Pay. American's are also using their phone more to pay.
- kube-system 5y ago
  For us ‘Mericans, all credit card transactions at a chip reader are chip+signature. We typically only have PIN numbers configured for debit cards. And most of those can be processed successfully without providing the PIN by pressing the credit button on the terminal.
  - aj3 5y ago
    No wonder people hate it then.
  - barsonme 5y ago
    Although, in many cases signatures aren’t necessary. Anecdotally, I can only recall having to sign a handful of times in the last five or so years. (Edit: outside of restaurants.) Also: it’s important to remember that running a debit card as credit isn’t the same thing as using debit. At most banks, your credit limit for debit cards (weird sentence, yeah) is very low: like $500 or so. If you call (and have sufficient funds), they’ll often temporarily raise it for you. (It’s how I paid for school on a debit card when the school could only run it as credit.)
moviuro 5y ago
Highway tolls didn't have contactless in France until 2016 at best. It's getting better now. https://www.autoplus.fr/securite-routiere/peages-le-paiement-sans-contact-debarque-389516.html https://www.autoplus.fr/securite-routiere/peages-le-paiement... - only 20 contactless toll gates in all of France in 2016 (gates, not tolls).
- kergonath 5y ago
  They seem to be everywhere now. France was the earliest adopter for chip and chip+pin, but they have been somewhat late to the contactless party (for a EU country).
ohazi 5y ago
From the card companies' perspective, the alternative to magstripe isn't contactless, it's contact (the smart card IC embedded in the physical card). In the US, the card companies convinced merchants to adopt the EMV contact standard by implementing a liability shift that would make the merchants liable for card-present magstripe fraud after a certain date. For merchants using POS terminals, the liability shift happened in 2015, and for gas stations it happened a few months ago (after several delays). EMV contact coverage needs to be essentially 100% before they'll consider getting rid of magstripe completely. Contactless is an entirely optional sideshow, and is not required by anyone anywhere. It has lots of issues (they somehow managed to make it less secure than magstripe(!), which is kind of appaling) and there are no plans to ever have it supersede EMV contact as the baseline standard.
- watermelon0 5y ago
  Contactless payment is also needed for Google Pay/Apple Pay (and others), which are more secure than chip and pin.
- yarcob 5y ago
  Contactless is not less secure than magstripe. I don't know where you got that from. You can't make a fake contactless card, because each card has a private key that you can't extract. But it's trivial to make a fake magnetic stripe card. One type of fraud with EU credit cards works like this: Criminal collects credit card numbers and pins by adding a hidden magnetic stripe reader to an ATM and a video camera, then create a fake magnetic card, and then withdraw money with fake card + PIN somewhere abroad where magnetic stripes are still allowed. For this reason, my bank disables withdrawals from abroad by default, and you need to manually enable world wide payments in the online banking app.
  - ohazi 5y ago
    You're correct that you can't easily clone an NFC card from RF interactions alone, but beyond that just about every other aspect of these cards is worse. Most contactless cards can be asked to transmit the cardholder's name, credit card number, and expiration date, and the card will happily do so, wirelessly. This is often enough to make fraudulent online transactions. It's trivially easy to build a device that does this using a microcontroller and a coil of wire. You don't need to have a payment processor's encryption key, you can just make one up and the card will reply. You can walk around in a crowded area with such a device and capture responses from hundreds of cards in under an hour. Electronic devices that clone your contactless card are usually better, as they generally require some sort of interaction before they'll respond -- actual physical contactless cards might as well be a megaphone attached to your credit card number. If you can capture a genuine transaction between a POS terminal and a contactless card, and if the transaction amount is below the card's floor limit, the transaction can often be replayed or relayed to a different terminal. With a cheap amplifier, this can be done reliably from low single digit ft away. The floor limit is usually somewhere around $20-$100 below which the terminal doesn't ask for a PIN or go online.
brnt 5y ago
Havnt used a magnetic strip in a decade. It's something from childhood!
chousuke 5y ago
Living in Europe, I genuinely had no idea cards with magnetic stripes were still in use. I thought everything used chips nowadays. I still prefer my card for contactless payments though; using my phone is not really much more convenient since my phone case holds the card anyway and it at least works consistently.
- watermelon0 5y ago
  It's more convenient if you need to pay more than 25 EUR (or whatever the limit is where you live), where you need to use your PIN with contactless card.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - LeonidasXIV 5y ago
    Or you use contactless payment with your phone which then does not have a 25 EUR limit (actually I think these days it is more like 50 EUR) since the phone supplies some form of authentication, which a plain contactless card can't.
    - watermelon0 5y ago
      Maybe I wrongly worded it, but I meant the same thing.
  - hvidgaard 5y ago
    Mag strip or chip, you still need your pin here. With contactless there is a limit of 50-100 EUR, and when you use Apple Pay you never have to provide a pin.
- Accacin 5y ago
  My Monzo card has a magstripe still, but I have to enable it in the app if I want to use it.
bamboozled 5y ago
Try visiting Japan, it's like 1989, everywhere you go.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Except for the excellent infrastructure, public transit, trains, roads, quality of food, safety, lack of junkies and meth addicts and mass homelessness, and so on, whereas its the US that is increasingly like 1880 almost everywhere you go...
dmd 5y ago
Because here in the US there are still gas stations using embossed credit card systems who get confused when your card doesn't have raised numbers on it.
cyanydeez 5y ago
backwoods.
Animats 5y ago
Where’s the bottleneck? Gas stations. The gas station industry has been avoiding upgrading pumps. It's expensive. Retail checkouts usually just need a replacement of the desktop unit, but gas pumps require actual modification. They got a 3-year delay, until October 2020. Then April 17, 2021. Then they got hit by the coronavirus epidemic. The upgrade has to be done by a qualified installer; you don't want someone who doesn't know what each wire does mucking about with the electrical innards of a gasoline pump. There isn't a huge supply of trained gas pump upgraders. There are many pump variations, and some can't be upgraded at all. Gas pumps often don't have an Internet connection, just a 2-wire twisted pair running RS-422 or something. The chip card readers, inevitably, want full Internet connectivity. Which means getting CAT-5 out to the pump. Which sometimes runs into CAT-5 length limitations. The older systems sometimes worked over dial-up. Average cost per pump is about $6,000. Gilbarco/Veeder-Root has a product which is basically a pair of DSL modems to allow using the existing 2-wire connection to carry the Internet out to the pump.[1] Amusingly, they'll give you this for free if you buy their product for running ads on the pump. And, of course, it's all "cloud-enabled". And that's why there's such a holdup. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtMxhmJh8V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtMxhmJh8V0
- 8fingerlouie 5y ago
  In Europe (Scandinavia at least), Gas stations use contactless, and most gas/oil companies have a dedicated app (think loyalty card) that can also handle payment for you over the internet. It uses GPS, so when you open the app at a gas station it already knows where you are, and simply asks you which pump you want to unlock.
  - kook_throwaway 5y ago
    Installing gas station spyware sounds to fill up sounds like hell.
    - jacobr 5y ago
      It only knows your location when you open the app, why is that a problem?
ComodoHacker 5y ago
>Why does it take so long? I guess one reason is global compatibility. For a global system to hold its promise, a card issued in one country (including developing ones) should be serviceable anywhere else.
kook_throwaway 5y ago
Contactless on tbe is near impossible if you want to escape from google.

by drclau 5y ago

robcohen 5y ago

It really is mind blowing to me. Especially in a pandemic, why why why require a signature for anything? This is one of the few things that would reduce exposure that we already have a technical solution for. I just don’t understand.

cinntaile 5y ago
Surfaces don't matter much for covid, it's very unlikely you'll catch it that way.
barbazoo 5y ago
As others have said, it doesn't have to be. Much of the world has long moved on from mag stripes and signatures.
gruez 5y ago
>Especially in a pandemic, why why why require a signature for anything? This is one of the few things that would reduce exposure that we already have a technical solution for. Turns out infection from surfaces is basically a non-issue. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-hygiene-cleaning-surfaces.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-hygien...
- dom96 5y ago
  Got any non-paywalled sources handy?
  - gruez 5y ago
    Normally I'd link to archive.is, but they put everything behind a captcha wall, which I'm not keen to solve. You can bypass the paywall with scripts disabled, but the key excerpts are: >But the era of “hygiene theater” may have come to an unofficial end this week, when the C.D.C. updated its surface cleaning guidelines (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/disinfecting-building-facility.html#anchor_1617548426741 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/disinfec...) and noted that the risk of contracting the virus from touching a contaminated surface was less than 1 in 10,000 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-research/surface-transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...). >“People can be affected with the virus that causes Covid-19 through contact with contaminated surfaces and objects,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said at a White House briefing on Monday. “However, evidence has demonstrated that the risk by this route of infection of transmission is actually low.”
- Johnny555 5y ago
  Coronavirus isn't the only virus to be concerned with, Norovirus is a well known one that can spread through surfaces, which is why it can be so rampant on cruise ships -- and it can live for weeks on surfaces. https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/about/transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/about/transmission.html
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Yes, but microphobia is more annoying than most viruses, and keeping the immune system unprepared due to lack of exposure is potentially fatal, so perhaps they don't want to encourage those...

gruez 5y ago

>I honestly don’t even recall the time when the magnetic strip was needed. for when you fly over to the US and need to use your card

zz865 5y ago
Assuming US starts to let people in again.
- tamaharbor 5y ago
  Use the southern entrance.
- klipt 5y ago
  There's a specific list of countries you can't travel from. Spend 2 weeks in any country not on that list and you're allowed in.
throwawayboise 5y ago
The holdouts have long been the gas station fuel pumps. Though that is finally changing at least where I am many stations now support chip and tap card payments.
- xahrepap 5y ago
  Gas stations around me (Utah) have all replaced their magstripe with a dual magstripe/chip reader. It drives me nuts though, because you still have to insert your card ALL THE WAY IN as if you're using the mag stripe, and then it decides which one to use. Are gas stations not a big target for skimmers? Why didn't they design it to avoid the magstripe-skimmers? have two inserts or something, I don't care. But now we're a FULL generation of gas station pumps away from being free'd from skimmers. I just don't understand. Also, don't get me started on the audio/video ads at the pump these days. They're the worst. I'd rather have to pay inside than have "while you're pumping" ads.
  - jwineinger 5y ago

salamandersauce 5y ago

America. They dragged their heels switching to chips.

xwdv 5y ago
More like the security wasn’t necessary due to decreased liabilities.

ddek 5y ago

The only reason I’ve started using my card lately is because Face ID is harder with a mask on.

drclau 5y ago
Just in case you have an Apple Watch and weren’t aware, or you plan to get one, there’s this feature that made my life easier: Unlock your iPhone with Apple Watch when you're wearing a face mask https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212208 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212208
- jdminhbg 5y ago
  This will unlock your phone but not authorize Apple Pay. So the Watch is much more convenient for payments in mask mandate areas. I find it more convenient to tap when unmasked too but that’s more personal preference.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- kalleboo 5y ago
  If you have an Apple Watch, you can just pay with the watch

stingraycharles 5y ago

There’s always that old book shop that doesn’t have the latest and greatest yet. And this type of support is typically enforced by contracts; eg if you buy some device that accepts MasterCard, they promise it will be supported for at least 10 years.

jmharvey 5y ago
I've been trying to shift to contactless payments recently, and my anecdotal experience has been the opposite: mom-and-pop shops usually have some kind of terminal from a dedicated payments company (verifone, square, etc) that's been updated in the last few years, while big behemoths (e.g. Lowe's, Fedex, USPS) are the holdouts clinging to bespoke antiquated payments hardware.

aidenn0 5y ago

The USA is a big holdup. I just traveled across the country and there are still filling (petrol) stations where the only card reader is stripe. See also other comments about the stripe being a fallback for chip as chip readers on POS terminals seem to be more fragile than magnetic stripe readers. FWIW, Contactless is very hit-or-miss for me in the US; about 1/3 the time it just doesn't work at all (even with multiple retries), and that's when the terminal has one. Was picking up something at the corner store the other day, realized I didn't have my wallet and contactless just didn't work with the phone at all for some reason.

anakaine 5y ago
On your point about contact less being hit-or-miss, this very much goes away when you have a number of options for vendors to choose from on the market, with terminals being supplied mainly by banks who want the business. Both competition and a lack of desire to deal with merchants having issues with the payment system provided lead to increases in reliability. The overseas market has been saturated with chips for 10-15 years, and contact less for 5+, probably notably more.
- jalk 5y ago
  I have asked in several stores (in Denmark) where contactless doesn’t work, but the terminal has the required hardware - The merchant has to pay a fee to enable contactless. My auto mechanic bitched loudly about it, until I told him he wanted $200 for enabling “daytime running lights” in my rear lights, which is also just “flipping a bit”
ryandrake 5y ago
Yea, the Achilles Heel of contactless (or phone/NFC) in the USA is the uncertainty that it's supported and the terrible UX for failure cases. How many times have you had this happen? Your groceries are all rung up and the POS terminal is waiting. You dig out your phone or contactless card and try to invoke the contactless payment system. Nothing's happening. You wave it around a little. Still nothing. Grocery cashier is looking at you like you're an idiot nerd, saying "That thing doesn't work. Just stick the card in the slot." Now I dig in my wallet looking for my chip card as the whole line behind me huffs about how much of a moron I am. Stick it in the POS terminal, and it waits... and waits... and waits... and finally, loudly proclaims BONK BONK BONK transaction approved. Everyone other than me is saying "Finally, we can move on". Contrast that with mag swipe: Pull out the card. Swipe it (which takes 500ms). Done.

poopypoopington 5y ago

To play devil's advocate – who cares? We've had magnetic strips for decades and they work fine. Yes, they're insecure but anti-fraud measures taken by the bank can mitigate that. If this helps more stores accept payments without having a painful transition isn't that worth it? I use Apple Pay most places but I don't mind having to use a strip once in a while or if others do.

Johnie 5y ago
Think about who is paying for that fraud. Prior to EMV liability shift, Banks paid for the fraud. After Liability Shift, merchants are paying for fraud using magstripe. Merchants don't want to be responsible for the fraud, so they are incentivized to get rid of the mag stripe.
- xattt 5y ago
  I really doubt that banks will pass on the savings onto the consumer of fraud mitigation once EMV is fully implemented.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Who cares? Just taking the profits away from criminals would be good enough.
  - hocuspocus 5y ago
    Force them. The EU has successfully capped interchange fees in 4-party schemes.
- syshum 5y ago
  Depends on the transaction, but merchants can absolutely be liable for fraud before the EMV shift... Also the rate of mag fraud is still pretty low, more Online Fraud which was ALWAYS liable to the merchant and did not see to do much ti incentivize any changes there. Causing 90% of your customers pain to save less than 1% on fraud is likely going to cost merchants more than just paying for the fraud, which is also the math online merchants used. Online merchants that have huge fraud prevention lost more customers than the fraud.... Hell I remember one time a online merchant wanted me to submit more info after the sale for anti-fraud... I cancelled the order and bought from someone else

bpodgursky 5y ago

I heard that gas station pumps were a big blocker for a while.

siruncledrew 5y ago

I think the merchants are the bottleneck in this case

djhworld 5y ago

> I honestly don’t even recall the time when the magnetic stripe was needed. Every time I've been to the US it's still magnetic stripe in places like restaurants/bars where the wait staff whisk your card away and then 4 days later the charge ends up appearing on your card. I saw chip and pin (or sometimes the odd chip and sign) appearing in the big shops/chains like walgreens though so I guess it's slowly changing. It felt a bit like what the UK was like 15-20 years ago.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mullen 5y ago
The Pandemic has really changed how credit cards are handled here. Pre-Pandemic, Tap and Pay was fairly rare, but now, it is everywhere (Nearly 90% by my informal count). The odd thing I noticed is that the smaller the market, the more likely the store/shop uses Tap and Pay. American's are also using their phone more to pay.
kube-system 5y ago
For us ‘Mericans, all credit card transactions at a chip reader are chip+signature. We typically only have PIN numbers configured for debit cards. And most of those can be processed successfully without providing the PIN by pressing the credit button on the terminal.
- aj3 5y ago
  No wonder people hate it then.
- barsonme 5y ago
  Although, in many cases signatures aren’t necessary. Anecdotally, I can only recall having to sign a handful of times in the last five or so years. (Edit: outside of restaurants.) Also: it’s important to remember that running a debit card as credit isn’t the same thing as using debit. At most banks, your credit limit for debit cards (weird sentence, yeah) is very low: like $500 or so. If you call (and have sufficient funds), they’ll often temporarily raise it for you. (It’s how I paid for school on a debit card when the school could only run it as credit.)

moviuro 5y ago

Highway tolls didn't have contactless in France until 2016 at best. It's getting better now. https://www.autoplus.fr/securite-routiere/peages-le-paiement-sans-contact-debarque-389516.html https://www.autoplus.fr/securite-routiere/peages-le-paiement... - only 20 contactless toll gates in all of France in 2016 (gates, not tolls).

kergonath 5y ago
They seem to be everywhere now. France was the earliest adopter for chip and chip+pin, but they have been somewhat late to the contactless party (for a EU country).

ohazi 5y ago

From the card companies' perspective, the alternative to magstripe isn't contactless, it's contact (the smart card IC embedded in the physical card). In the US, the card companies convinced merchants to adopt the EMV contact standard by implementing a liability shift that would make the merchants liable for card-present magstripe fraud after a certain date. For merchants using POS terminals, the liability shift happened in 2015, and for gas stations it happened a few months ago (after several delays). EMV contact coverage needs to be essentially 100% before they'll consider getting rid of magstripe completely. Contactless is an entirely optional sideshow, and is not required by anyone anywhere. It has lots of issues (they somehow managed to make it less secure than magstripe(!), which is kind of appaling) and there are no plans to ever have it supersede EMV contact as the baseline standard.

watermelon0 5y ago
Contactless payment is also needed for Google Pay/Apple Pay (and others), which are more secure than chip and pin.
yarcob 5y ago
Contactless is not less secure than magstripe. I don't know where you got that from. You can't make a fake contactless card, because each card has a private key that you can't extract. But it's trivial to make a fake magnetic stripe card. One type of fraud with EU credit cards works like this: Criminal collects credit card numbers and pins by adding a hidden magnetic stripe reader to an ATM and a video camera, then create a fake magnetic card, and then withdraw money with fake card + PIN somewhere abroad where magnetic stripes are still allowed. For this reason, my bank disables withdrawals from abroad by default, and you need to manually enable world wide payments in the online banking app.
- ohazi 5y ago
  You're correct that you can't easily clone an NFC card from RF interactions alone, but beyond that just about every other aspect of these cards is worse. Most contactless cards can be asked to transmit the cardholder's name, credit card number, and expiration date, and the card will happily do so, wirelessly. This is often enough to make fraudulent online transactions. It's trivially easy to build a device that does this using a microcontroller and a coil of wire. You don't need to have a payment processor's encryption key, you can just make one up and the card will reply. You can walk around in a crowded area with such a device and capture responses from hundreds of cards in under an hour. Electronic devices that clone your contactless card are usually better, as they generally require some sort of interaction before they'll respond -- actual physical contactless cards might as well be a megaphone attached to your credit card number. If you can capture a genuine transaction between a POS terminal and a contactless card, and if the transaction amount is below the card's floor limit, the transaction can often be replayed or relayed to a different terminal. With a cheap amplifier, this can be done reliably from low single digit ft away. The floor limit is usually somewhere around $20-$100 below which the terminal doesn't ask for a PIN or go online.

brnt 5y ago

Havnt used a magnetic strip in a decade. It's something from childhood!

chousuke 5y ago

Living in Europe, I genuinely had no idea cards with magnetic stripes were still in use. I thought everything used chips nowadays. I still prefer my card for contactless payments though; using my phone is not really much more convenient since my phone case holds the card anyway and it at least works consistently.

watermelon0 5y ago
It's more convenient if you need to pay more than 25 EUR (or whatever the limit is where you live), where you need to use your PIN with contactless card.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- LeonidasXIV 5y ago
  Or you use contactless payment with your phone which then does not have a 25 EUR limit (actually I think these days it is more like 50 EUR) since the phone supplies some form of authentication, which a plain contactless card can't.
  - watermelon0 5y ago
    Maybe I wrongly worded it, but I meant the same thing.
- hvidgaard 5y ago
  Mag strip or chip, you still need your pin here. With contactless there is a limit of 50-100 EUR, and when you use Apple Pay you never have to provide a pin.
Accacin 5y ago
My Monzo card has a magstripe still, but I have to enable it in the app if I want to use it.

bamboozled 5y ago

Try visiting Japan, it's like 1989, everywhere you go.

coldtea 5y ago
Except for the excellent infrastructure, public transit, trains, roads, quality of food, safety, lack of junkies and meth addicts and mass homelessness, and so on, whereas its the US that is increasingly like 1880 almost everywhere you go...

dmd 5y ago

Because here in the US there are still gas stations using embossed credit card systems who get confused when your card doesn't have raised numbers on it.

cyanydeez 5y ago

backwoods.

Animats 5y ago

Where’s the bottleneck? Gas stations. The gas station industry has been avoiding upgrading pumps. It's expensive. Retail checkouts usually just need a replacement of the desktop unit, but gas pumps require actual modification. They got a 3-year delay, until October 2020. Then April 17, 2021. Then they got hit by the coronavirus epidemic. The upgrade has to be done by a qualified installer; you don't want someone who doesn't know what each wire does mucking about with the electrical innards of a gasoline pump. There isn't a huge supply of trained gas pump upgraders. There are many pump variations, and some can't be upgraded at all. Gas pumps often don't have an Internet connection, just a 2-wire twisted pair running RS-422 or something. The chip card readers, inevitably, want full Internet connectivity. Which means getting CAT-5 out to the pump. Which sometimes runs into CAT-5 length limitations. The older systems sometimes worked over dial-up. Average cost per pump is about $6,000. Gilbarco/Veeder-Root has a product which is basically a pair of DSL modems to allow using the existing 2-wire connection to carry the Internet out to the pump.[1] Amusingly, they'll give you this for free if you buy their product for running ads on the pump. And, of course, it's all "cloud-enabled". And that's why there's such a holdup. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtMxhmJh8V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtMxhmJh8V0

8fingerlouie 5y ago
In Europe (Scandinavia at least), Gas stations use contactless, and most gas/oil companies have a dedicated app (think loyalty card) that can also handle payment for you over the internet. It uses GPS, so when you open the app at a gas station it already knows where you are, and simply asks you which pump you want to unlock.
- kook_throwaway 5y ago
  Installing gas station spyware sounds to fill up sounds like hell.
  - jacobr 5y ago
    It only knows your location when you open the app, why is that a problem?

ComodoHacker 5y ago

>Why does it take so long? I guess one reason is global compatibility. For a global system to hold its promise, a card issued in one country (including developing ones) should be serviceable anywhere else.

kook_throwaway 5y ago

Contactless on tbe is near impossible if you want to escape from google.