Originally Posted by
Ghoulish
Not common at all outside of Europe, where banks are exceptionally sensitive to fraud losses.
The US consumer is very well insulated against card fraud so banks have been less motivated to spend on extra security measures.
In most regions where Visa and Mastercard operate, they've already mandated terminal
and card support for contactless or are in the process of doing so. The US is definitely the outlier in terms of usage and overall merchant acceptance. Hell, we've technically had contactless since 2014 if you were willing to tap a phone but it got almost no use until the pandemic despite gradually increasing merchant acceptance.
If anything, waiving PIN for smaller transactions (by letting people tap instead of insert) might reduce fraud by making the physical card harder to use for larger purchases if it were indeed stolen.