Originally Posted by
tmiw
This is a country where getting fraud taken care of only requires one phone call (and not even that if you have the bank's mobile app and your lost/stolen card hasn't been used yet). From those people's perspective, why would they want something that makes things slower with seemingly no visible benefit*? Only changing the card presentment part of the equation and not the cardholder verification part doesn't help with that impression, either; lots of people think that getting the physical card stolen (which PIN would help with) is the most common form of fraud when that's not the case.
* One could argue that fees, etc. might end up going down with less fraud in the system but I'd also argue that they quite possibly wouldn't. For example, when Durbin capped debit card interchange, a lot of other bank fees actually increased soon afterward. That's not to say that our fees will go up once EMV becomes universal, but they aren't going to be in such a huge rush to take a bite out of their own profits if we're willing to pay either.
There's two different laws for credit and debit card transactions. Credit card transactions are by far the better of the two, but it seems like most people use debit cards. Debit cards may be covered reasonably well by the big banks like Chase, but from my experience, credit unions are more difficult to deal with in cases of fraud, often times slower to credit your account back, have a more difficult process (such as through paperwork instead of online), and aren't willing to overnight a card to you for free, if at all.
I think many people overestimate how much a bank protects their debit cards, and I think EMV is a good solution to help the issues that exist.