Originally Posted by
Mike Jacoubowsky
By the way, those restaraunts that won't take an MC or Visa because it isn't Euro-style? They have all, every single one of them, signed a merchant agreement stating that they will take such cards.
Merchant agreements are different in Europe. In Europe, VISA and MC actually promote the use of EMV as way to tackle fraud. In fact, if 75% or more of their card transactions are done via the EMV chip, merchants are exempt from paying expensive annual PCI-DSS security fees. There's a mutual consensus between VISA, MC, issuers, and merchants NOT to take the old magnetic stripe in Europe.
So what happens if the 0.01% chance that an American shows up with an antiquated card that only has the magnetic stripe? Chances are the waiters or clerks, likely to be younger, part-time minimum wage earners who absolutely have no idea what a mag-stripe is because 99.9% of their clientele uses EMV, will have no clue what to do because it's not in their SOP. To them, it's so old-fashioned as writing a check at the supermarket here in the US that minimum wage cashiers have no clue what to do, and would require assistance of a manager who actually remembers how to do it the "old fashioned" way.
BTW, complaining to VISA or MC won't help; they're not going to revoke the merchant's contract just because they refused to take the old magnetic stripe. To them, 99.9% of their usual clients have no problem. The 0.01% Americans who still use the 50 year old technology are the anomaly and they are NOT going to change that policy just because American banks refuse to get onboard with EMV. Rather, the usual statement from VISA and MC is "it's not our fault, we've been asking them to move to EMV for years but they don't want to. Ask your US financial institution to get onboard with EMV."
Originally Posted by
mikew99
I'm aware of these threads but stopped following them when it looked like U.S. banks weren't delivering a chip & pin solution.
From the latest reports, it seems there is still a ways to go (chip & sig simply doesn't work everywhere that chip & pin does). Do you have a different understanding?
Consensus so far is that the Andrews FCU Globetrek Rewards Card is the best "backup card" to date which offers full Chip-and-
PIN, no annual fee, 1% forex rate, and earns rewards (rewards good/bad depends on you) which isn't subject to strict qualification standards.
Whether the steps necessary to get a card is worth the hassle until something better comes along, YMMV:
See
post 641 in
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/credi...nature-43.html thread