Originally Posted by
Kremmen
This doesn't strike me as weird. Australia has had PINs on cards for decades without chips. The recent edict that signatures are no longer to be accepted on local credit cards doesn't force chips to appear. EFTPOS cards are unlikely to be affected at all. I guess the replacement ones in a year or two will have chips. On the credit card side, Amex was much slower to implement any changes, including having PINS at all, than Visa/Mastercard.
Sounds accurate to me. I know one place that was rejecting any PIN-less transactions only weeks after Australia switched to PIN-only. If tourists keep to places that expect ancient PIN-less cards, they'll be fine. Otherwise, you will find that merchants are expecting tap or PIN and you are likely, at the very least, to experience confusion and/or annoyance from merchants having to deal with signatures again.
(It probably doesn't help that in the massive stream of media reporting and Visa/Mastercard publicity in Australia, I never saw any mention that non-PIN cards exist in some countries overseas, let alone that those would still be accepted in Australia. It is covered in the last FAQ at the bottom of the page on pinwise.com.au, but I'll bet most people have never read that.)
Yes and no. One of the things that pushed US banks to em v in the first place was the growing problem of merchants refusing to process mag strip cards. This was the original impetus to begin travelling the emv road. But it quickly became clear the American banks were implementing signature priority cards. There were scattered, very scattered to be fair, of merchants telling people with c&s cards they would not continue processing the card even though the pos terminal had already approved the transaction and tne message signature required came up on the screen. As mor and more US banks began issuing more and more c&s cards, the number of such reports have not only not grown but have actually seemed to decrease. Visa has been very adamant that it will be supporting c&s adoption in the US by working with all merchants to try to make sure they understand c&s cards are just as valid as c&s. They have also put into effect regulations, whether they will work or not is another matter, prohibiting the rejection of pin less emv compliant cards in unpersonneled kiosks.
We can argue from now till whenever just how much more c&p is than c&s or just how effective these regulations will prove but if they do work, then from a consumer viewpoint unless one lays away nights worrying what happens if his or her card is lost or stolen, it won't matter the USA goes for c&s priority. We will just have to wait and see.