Interestingly, American express hired my uncle to help them integrate smart chips into credit card in the late 90s. He took the Concord twice a month on a Paris

Interestingly, American express hired my uncle to help them integrate smart chips into credit card in the late 90s. He took the Concord twice a month on a Paris-NY. It was hell, a lot of different banks and a love of magnetic stripe despite the fraud being easier with those prevented any mass adoption. I think that while he was successful technologically (American express credit card had a chip i think? But honestly i'm not sure, don't take my word for it _at all_), but politically it was a sysiphian effort and they scraped the project. For him the reason was that the cost of fraud was lower than in France, and also pushed into users, and unless you made bank liable (i think that's the word) in case of fraud, so a more secure method of payment wasn't interesting for the banks (in that case why american express?). Anyway, all that to say that from what i've heard from him, AmEx, Visa and masterCard had to be from the US because the banking sector was so fragmented, in so many ways (different actors, different regulations, different fraud tolerance), it was sorely needed.