Originally Posted by
Hawaiian717
I have similar feelings about Navy Federal. Their pilot program cards were PIN priority, and targeted mainly towards their overseas members. Their information about the cards touted the additional security of Chip & PIN. Then when they ended the pilot and rolled out EMV to everyone, they removed the promotion of the additional security provided by the PIN and sent out Signature priority cards. Which seems odd considering the number of members they would have who get stationed in Europe where PIN is the norm.
I had my first unattended kiosk fail with any card yesterday. Argos apparently has their system setup to see the signature entry, display "not authorised", and force you to wait in the long queue (which I did). Granted this is a case of the kiosks simply not parsing the CVM list, but it proves the theory that having offline PIN somewhere in the list is all you need is totally bogus.
PS the reason I know it is a chip and PIN related problem is the message on the POS was that the only non-chip and PIN cards accepted are Argos cards. The system simply did not bother parsing the CVM list far enough to even see if their was a PIN it could use. I know this is Argos' fault. But as a customer all I can think is "it would be nice if the card companies fixed this."
Though, I must say, I'm very glad I got the HSBC card. Having contactless eliminates 90% of the issues in London at least.