Originally Posted by
kebosabi
Continued reliance on the mag stripe when everybody else had made the switch to Chip & PIN that it is now a defacto global standard in payment processing is like making a new cell phone that's so advanced but can only be used in one country (Japan) while everybody else is running GSM.
In terms of credit cards, it seems the US is suffering the same
Galapagos syndrome similar to Japanese cell phones.
I think it's a simpler explanation: European and other countries had a problem with fraud. The fraud was expensive, so they invested in chip and pin and it addressed the problem. The US solved the problem with a different technology solution: all-online authorization. Given that transaction volumes are so much higher in the US on a per-consumer basis, it isn't unreasonable to see a different solution, but the split is starting to cause real problems for consumers who travel abroad, and US banks need to step up to solve this for us.