Originally Posted by
MichaelBrighton
You certainly know your banks better than I do. But, does that mean if you contact the bank within three or four days and say it was lost on Thursday that they will without question credit you for any costs after Thursday?
Generally, if you notify them within 48 hours, yes. By law, if you notify your bank within this timeframe, your maximum liability is $50, although banks rarely charge anything at all. Many issuers offer policies that are even more generous than this.
This is more what I am talking about: isn't there a movement in the US toward the Chip and Pin? A slow movement perhaps? If so, my point is that if customers complained more to the banks, they might move faster. I also don't quite understand why they are going to an intermediate technology rather than straight to the final technology as was done here.
The movement is toward Chip+Sig, not Chip+PIN. There are a handful of issues, like the State Department Federal Credit Union and the American Airlines Credit Union that offer Chip+PIN since their employees spend a lot of time abroad, but this is generally not the case.
I just don't understand it. I don't understand the delay and I don't understand why a middle step is being made. Clearly, using a signature is a security problem. If the banks must repay customers whose card was lost or stolen and then used by someone (because there is in effect nothing to stop them from using it), that must be costing them money. From what I know about banks (not an expert, but my wife works for one), losing money is not something they are happy to do.
It does cost them money, although a lot of liability is shifted to the merchant -- it depends on what steps (if any) they took to verify the card belonged to the cardholder. Banks have sophisticated risk detection software that will often flag a lot of these transactions before the first one is successfully posted, but sometimes they do get through. Big stores factor these chargebacks into the cost of doing business.
Signatures have always been the convention in the US, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. It's possible that once the transition to EMV is complete, issuers will then push for a transition to PIN-based cards, but for now the only PINs that are used on credit cards issued here are for cash advances from an ATM.