Originally Posted by
JEFFJAGUAR
Welcome. If you have a couple of hours of spare time, you can go through this 290 page thread which is still growing and you will find your answer somewhere.
When several fcu's in the DC area introduced with great (or maybe not so great) fanfare their new generation of chip and pin cards (c&p), we all shouted in harmony hip hip horay or something to that effect. And then we found out the truth when people started using PenFed or State Department or Andrews FCU's supposed c&p card. It's in here somewhere..
You are quite right that their CSR's do not have a clue what their product does. They have been doing a dance around the question of whether this card will work in unmanned terminals (latest word is they won't, but I'm not buying it). Their responses to my questions have been contradictory even within the same email (e.g. at a merchant terminal that requires a PIN it will default to PIN, but at terminals that are unmanned, it won't work because "we require as signature"). I think I'm finally narrowing the issue down to: It's a Chip and Signature card with PIN capability when required. But nobody to date has given me a straight answer, they drag in non-issues like "your card has a magnetic stripe because merchants in the US....blah blah", and "we don't offer a chip-only card".