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Merchant adoption. Nobody wants to pay for new EMV-capable payment terminals; heck, at a conference I went to two years ago, people were still using carbon cop
by cbhl 13y ago
Merchant adoption.
Nobody wants to pay for new EMV-capable payment terminals; heck, at a conference I went to two years ago, people were still using carbon copy credit-card processing machines (!).
In the SF Bay Area, every merchant that uses Square as a payment processor can only process mag-stripe transactions. Square supports neither Chip and PIN nor NFC/PayPass/PayWave transactions -- by design. (This leads to a "better customer experience", IIRC.)
OTOH, the huge machine-learning machinery built by credit-card processors in the US has helped mitigate much of this risk; I've had enough false positive declines that I'm confident that the fraud-prevention systems currently used, while expensive, work in 90+% of cases.
Edit: I should mention that in Canada, Chip-and-PIN roll-out occurred concurrently with the roll-out of NFC/PayWave/PayPass, so the "increased" security of PIN was offset by the ability to read your credit card wirelessly. The banks mitigate this by limiting PayWave/PayPass transactions to ~$100 (it's meant to be used for things like going to McDonald's or Tim Horton's/Starbucks).
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoI think the problem is that the US never made the jump to instant Debit Card payments in the first place, and is still stuck with in a world of using either Credit or cash. In the Netherlands, cash is on the way out due to the massive adoption of instant Debit Card payments for even the smallest purchases. Merchants prefer not to handle cash because it's safer (robbing a store with no money is pointless) and cheaper (no dealing with money transports, deposits, counting the registers, having change on hand). Compared to all of that, getting card terminals is cheap. Using the same system for Credit Cards is mostly just a side-effect of the push to eliminate cash. It's also the reason Credit Card usage isn't all that widespread in the Netherlands. They're only used for big ticket items (sparingly), on vacation and for international online purchases.
- frandroid 13y agoHuh, the U.S. has debit, what are you talking about.
- cbhl 13y agoI was under the impression that PLUS was simply used at ATMs. By comparison, many merchants in Canada accept Interac. The fees for Interac are typically rather low (IIRC, a monthly fee plus $0.50/transaction) compared to Visa/MC (some percentage of the sale, depending on risk). Debit transactions through Visa/MasterCard generally just give you the worst of both worlds (high merchant fees, and transactions affect your checking account balance instantly).
- maxerickson 13y agoThere are multiple debit networks in the U.S. I'm not sure about the fees, but I'm under the impression they are lower than credit (mostly because POS systems are set up to prefer PIN style transactions).
- joezydeco 13y agoHere's an ad that Citibank has been running in the last couple of weeks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP_X6j06EGE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP_X6j06EGE Notice what you see at 0:13? A chipped card. In America. So it seems someone is trying to get this moving...