Originally Posted by kebosabi

They do. Except the manufacturers of the said kiosks and the organizations that opted to install said chip only kiosks could careless because 99.9% of the kiosk users have an EMV chip card and it's only the rare 0.01% occurrence are Americans who only have a mag-stripe card. And what's the penalty? Probably very low enough to warrant it.

Why should the manufacturers and organizations spend more or whatever it costs to ensure it takes an old technology like a mag-stripe which has the risk of having skimming devices installed on top of them by fraudsters? Why should they be held hostage to the stupidity of American banks that refuse to issue hybrid cards to their cardholders?

Overall, it's the matter of the size of the market.

If VISA mandates that kiosks in Italy should have the ability to process mag-stripes as well as the chip or face the penalty of $5 for every occurrence that it doesn't, but if every Italian has a chip-and-pin card, and pretty much every Canadian, Japanese, German, or any other non-American cardholder that visits Italy has a chip-and-PIN card, why should they spend more to ensure that it takes an ancient technology like the mag-stripe as well? Oops, that's right there's that 0.01% of American tourists to Italy that don't have hybrid cards. Well, sucks to be them and their backwards banks, we'll just eat up the EUR 5 fine.