Originally Posted by
JEFFJAGUAR
The reality is that the attempt to impose chip and pin in the USA, as of now, is a failure. How much it will move in the next few months before the deadline is problematic. However, and I've said this before, my concern is not whether the merchants accept chip and pin or chip and signature or even just continue to accept swipe and maybe sign. The problem and the genesis of this over 10,000 message thread has and should be whether our cards will be accepted everywhere. We do maintain zero liability and even if chip and pin had succeeded the way many here wanted, all it would mean is the counterfeiting of cards at pos terminals would have lessened; the result would have been probably a shift to much more online fraud. Apparently, if visa and the other networks commitments come to fruition, there will be far far fewe problems with using American cards either at personneled or unpersonneled merchants and kiosks throughout the rest of the world. That should be the issue and not the constant whining, no offense meant to anybody, about Walmart is not enforcing the security and so many merchants are not rushing down to implement emv or that restaurants will not be getting the mobile terminals to do chip and pin transactions. Sure, they might be preferable and increase security a tad but to me, that remains a non issue.
Meh, I've pretty much given up on fighting for PIN preferred really. For the vast majority of travelers PIN backup is more than enough, and even if there's no PIN backup it's probably still fine. You may have to wait in the long manned line instead of being able to use kiosks though, for better or worse.
The real problem now is that US banks pretty much screwed themselves over on contactless/Apple Pay acceptance with chip and signature. A lot of people are simply not going to bother using it because it doesn't add enough to convenience. There will also be a lot fewer places that will accept it than people expect, with restaurants still taking cards to the back and a fair number of smaller businesses not giving customers access and/or simply not knowing how to accept contactless. I bet in a couple of years Tim Cook stops talking about Apple Pay in the US and only mentions its growth OUS (they're not going to admit that its growth hasn't met expectations because that's akin to admitting failure).
Of course I've been wrong a lot so we'll see. Maybe merchant training does get better and Apple Pay still has double digit growth rates five years from now. And maybe the card taking at restaurants ultimately doesn't matter because we just pay with Apple Pay/Google Wallet in the restaurant's app instead.
