Originally Posted by
3Cforme
That's a great explanation, but take it farther:
- Of the 686 million Visa cards issued, how many are used by (frequent, regular) international travelers?
- Of that population, how many regard the status quo as a problem?
- Of those, what's the median value they're willing to pay for a fix? (I wouldn't pay $10 annually as I don't view work-arounds as that troublesome for my volume of transactions.)
One sees pretty quickly why U.S. banks haven't spent $ Billions to copy the smartchip scheme.
More reason to start issuing them as an optional upgrade card; take a look at the UNFCU example; it didn't issue them to everybody, it added the C&P feature to its top customers while providing an option for others to upgrade for a fee. And the UNFCU isn't forcing anyone in the US to change over to Chip & PIN either, those new EMV capable VISA Elite cards issued by the UNFCU still work perfectly in the US because it retains the mag-stripe.
There's no reason why banks should roll out C&P enabled cards for all the 686 million VISA cards out there; just roll them out to those who want one and who wants to pay for the upgrade. Just like how Microsoft became successful, no one is forced to upgrade, the decision to upgrade will be left as a choice to the consumer. Some people are happy with XP and Vista, others want Windows 7. Same thing with credit cards, many are happy with the mag-stripe, others have faced issues using them abroad and are willing to upgrade for the extra feature of having a mag-stripe, chip & PIN and even a contactless in a single card.
30% of Americans own passport today and 60 million+ Americans travel abroad every year and those numbers continue to grow. And as more Americans travel abroad, this issue is only going to get worse, tantamount to a bad PR disaster and might even lead to a costly class action lawsuit.
Why continue to dilly dally when they can provide an option? Sounds like a perfect opportunity for US banks to earn extra revenue by providing an option for people to upgrade their existing cards to C&P to those Americans that want one.
If there's no market data to know if Americans are willing to pay for such a thing, just put in a survey on the online billing section:
"Our bank is committed to fighting fraud and continue to provide global acceptance of our credit cards. Our bank is considering about upgrading our customer's cards with the latest technology proven to cut fraud in Europe and in Asia at the same time implementing a new payment method that is now fastly becoming the global standard.
However, these cards are more expensive to produce than the current cards which are issued complimentary to you. As such, we like to ask you a couple of questions about this upgraded card."
Alternatively, Gemalto can also collect their own market data by creating a questionaire on e-rewards.com. What better way to collect real data from those that use credit cards the most; through a questionaire targeted for people that collect frequent flyer miles?