reft

Good point.

kebosabi

Bottom line is that the banks in the US have yet to learn the "backwards compatibility" concept.

Mag-stipe is incompatible with EMV, but the rest of the world figured out that you can make it backwards compatible by issuing a hybrid card that has the EMV chip but yet retains the mag-stripe on the back as a fall back system.

The US banks however, can't seem to grasp that concept:

Re-cap of US banks' excuses for the past decade:

The rest of the world: We made/making the switch to EMV
US cardholders: Dude, this sucks. Our plastic don't work and we're paying annual fees for this!? Can we get EMV cards?
US banks: No because we don't use that here.

US cardholders: But the rest of the world issues hybrid cards that retains the mag-stripe along with the EMV. Can't you issue those instead? That way we can use the mag-stripe in the US and the EMV chip when we travel abroad.
US banks: No, it's gonna cost us money. Just tell them to swipe it, they have to do it, it's in their merchant agreement with VISA/MC/AMEX.
US cardholders: Yeah, easy enough if they speak English and their minimum wage earning cashiers give a ....!

US banks: Sucks to be you, we're not doing it until we start using it in our own country. And that ain't gonna happen cuz it'll cost too much money to convert all of the terminals in the US to accept EMV.

Wal-Mart: We started doing now. Can you start issuing them now?
US banks: Errr...no, not yet. Not everyone is converted yet

Best-Buy: We started it too. Can you start issuing them now?
US banks: No, not yet. Not everyone is converted. It's only Wal-Mart and Bestbuy

Target/7-11/Michaels/Luckys/law enforcement agencies/US Treasury Dept: Look, we're tired of this skimming fraud liability BS. Can we get you to issue more secure cards like the rest of the world now?
US banks: No, because we already looking ahead and spending billions of dollars for the next big thing. EMV is broken.

US cardholders: Is the next big thing backwards compatible with EMV?
US banks: No
US cardholders: So it doesn't solve any of our problems does it?
US banks: The rest of the world will eventually follow suit
The rest of the world: Yeah, in the next decade or so. Things like that don't quite happen overnight at a flick of a button across 250+ countries and billions of payment terminals all over the world ya' know.
US cardholders: So even if we move on to the next big thing, we're still screwed for at least a decade when we travel abroad?
US banks: Yep


FAIL

cbn42

They overcame it by passing legislation, which will never happen in the US for certain reasons that I don't want to get into.

Vasco

I have found this discussion rather amusing, because my experience (as a holder of Canadian EMV cards) is the flip side of this scenario.

I experience no end of annoyance when travelling in a non-EMV country as my card is first swiped, only for the terminal to emit a loud beep and display an error referring the cashier to insert the card for Chip authentication. The cashier, puzzled will often cancel the transaction and swipe the card again, resulting in the same error. I show him what to do, and instead of leaving the card in the machine he'll insert it and immediately remove it as if he was swiping the chip. No, I have to say, you must leave the card in the machine. Only then can we proceed with the transaction, though about 50% of the time when the request comes for the PIN, the cashier assumes it is some special PIN that he ought to know, and not the PIN of the cardholder. I try to say it is my PIN, but often language is a barrier, and so he's on the phone calling his manager to come over. Once the correct steps have been done, my PIN entered, I am still required to sign the slip.

All in all, more than 5 minutes (often close to 10) to complete a payment transaction that used to take less than 60 seconds when it was just swipe and sign.

The upside though, is that at least I know that my Canadian card will be accepted in the end. It may be annoying for me and those waiting behind me, but in the end my card will be accepted and I can go on my way. (The only place I have ever had trouble with an EMV card is West Africa. Not with a credit card mind you, but with EMV debit cards at ATMs. No problems paying by credit card, but impossible to withdraw cash from most ATMs.)

My biggest pet-peeve with EMV however, is that waiters insist on taking my card away from me. Part of the point of EMV is that my card should not leave my hands, so that they may not swipe the mag-stripe and skim it surreptitiously. Just bring me the portable machine to my table when you bring the bill and let me do the work of paying.

Stephen65

Four of my six Australian credit cards have chip plus mag stripe. The two that don't are Amex cards and they are in the progress of migrating to chip plus mag stripe.

As a sidenote the use of cheques to pay for smaller day to day transactions like groceries has always been unusual in Australia even back in the day before credit cards. Before credit cards people used (and many still use) cash. I have stood in thousands of supermarket lines from the early 80s onwards and I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have seen a cheque used.

JEFFJAGUAR

Sometimes I have the opposite problem using a non emv card in a certain chain of convenience stores in London. I give the card and the cashier insists it has to be entered in the chip slot to activate the magnetic stripe process. Personallyh I don't believe the cashier. The problem is that continued insertion of the magnetic stripe card in the chip slot qujickly starts compromising the signature panel and in London, unlike the United States, almost all cashiers make a pretense of checking signatures on the magnetic stripe cards (conversely these days in the USA almost nobody checks signatures although most of my purchases are relatively small and I would suppose if my charges were larger, they would check signatures more closely; most places in the USA I go to, fast food, groceries, petrol stations have swipe terminals and usually the card never leaves my hand)..

Also, as with everything else with our wonderful banks such as Bank of America (we have to charge $5/month for a debit card because we have a right to make a profit) have found that they can put the emv chip into more expensive cards all the better to get people to buy into huge annual fees. The fact Chase issues some of its airline cards with emv chips is indicative that the back office operations at Chase work with emv chips (although they use chip and signature instead of chip and pin) but they don't want to make hybrid cards available to the general public to generate more fees from their high end customers (personally, if they charged what it costs to issue an emv card, probably about a dime, I'd even pay to give them a 100% profit on it)). After all, none of our American banks ever misses an opportunity to tag customers with higher and higher fees under the guise they are providing a service!

kebosabi

While I agree with many of the points, I have to remind that we do have options today which weren’t available just a year ago. And said options do not require to one be a multi-millionaire, have an outrageous annual fee of $300+, be part of a corporate elite, or be restricted to credit union membership qualifications.

We have several EMV (albeit Chip-and-Signature) cards in the US TODAY that are within the reach of the average American’s budget. Granted it’s not the best, but it’s a start:

JP Morgan Select card
$95 annual fee, earns travel rewards points, no forex fees, has a really nice primary rental car insurance

BA Chase card
$95 annual fee, earns BA Avios points, no forex fees

US Bank FlexPerks card
$45 annual fee, earns travel rewards points, has a forex fee, but it also comes with a contactless chip included for three-way processing (mag-stripe/EMV/contactless) all in one card (unlike those stupid cell phone stickers that Citi hands out)

If the need for EMV on your existing credit cards are important, you can use these to your advantage. Just call your credit card company and tell them you wish to cancel your card because it doesn’t have the EMV chip and that you’re going to get the JP Morgan Select, BA Chase, or the US Bank FlexPerks card instead.

They’ll try to throw you every meat and bone in order to retain you, but stand firm you’re not interested and the need for EMV is important to you. The more people start doing this, the banks will “get” the message that having an EMV chip is a big factor for their customers.

Sooner or later, you’ll see the free market competition to take play on its own and they’ll all be scrambling to get them issued. Why would any bank want to lose a customer to another competitor? If a competitor (Chase or US Bank) has the EMV advantage over others (BofA, Citi, CapitalOne), use it to your advantage.

By doing so, US banks will "get" that multi-millionaires and corporate elites aren't the only Americans that travel to internationally and that there are close to 100,000,000 Americans out there with US Passports (basing on statistics that 30% of Americans has an US Passport), which is a considerable amount of customers. I'm sure no bank wants to lose 100,000,000 banking customers to be taken away by Chase or US Bank, do they? And as competition heats up, sooner or later every bank will have no choice but to start issuing EMV cards.



So bottom line is, if you consider the EMV chip factor to be more important than all the other credit cards out there with their multitude of offers, call your card company and make the switch to Chase or US Bank.

JEFFJAGUAR

I'm very easy going in what I desire and think I am entitled to in a credit card.

1. 2% cash back on ll purchases with periodic sales on selected categories (such as Chase Freedom, Schwab dba Bank of America cash rewards, Discover) plus

2. No annual fee plus

3. No foreign transaction fee plus

4. Chip and pin or at the very least chip and signature...

When a card such as this comes along, I'll be the first in line to sign up. Somehow I think such cards are not very imminent.

kebosabi

Sure it would be nice to have such a card, I agree. However, we can't have everything from the start. And the point that you're making today is that an EMV chip is not that important to you compared to no annual fees and cash back incentives. If such is the case, banks will continue to just downplay the EMV by saying "Americans value no annual fees and cash back incentives over EMV, so why bother issuing them."

The only way EMV will ever gain a foothold is when American cardholders start valuing the security and the international compatibility feature of the EMV chip over all the other incentives out there.

To put it into perspective, today is:

US Bank/Chase: we offer EMV cards for anyone interested in them
other banks: we'll play wait and see
American cardholders: meh, EMV isn't that important for me yet; I value no annual fees and cashback incentives to be more attractive
other banks: ok, we'll just issue them for high value clients


When a paradigm shift occurs to:

US Bank/Chase: we're still offering EMV cards for anyone interested in them
other banks: we only issue EMV cards to only our high value clients
American cardholders: Forget all your incentives, I'm sick and tired of being issued replacement cards every three months, having your fraud department shutting my credit card off at your whim without telling me the cause, calling me at odd hours to verify my transactions, and having my card skimmed at Luckys/Michaels/etc. Add all this to the pain-in-the-butt situation where I can't use my card when I travel abroad, forget it! I'm going to US Bank and Chase
other banks: okay, okay, we'll start issuing EMV cards for everyone that wants them too and we'll up the ante with lower annual fees than Chase or US Bank
US Bank/Chase: we take your challenge and do no annual fees
other banks: we then up your challenge by offering 100,000 points in sign up bonus

Then you get what you want.

JEFFJAGUAR

Or the government can get off its butt and begin requiring emv cards; which is basically the way, as I understand it, it happened in Great Britain. We have this thing in our country that only the free market works but then again, it is the role of government to act in the best interests of the public. Some times I think our total reliance on the free market in this country operates to the detriment of the general public.

kebosabi

Surprisingly, the US gov't can do exactly that now. The Durbin Amendment which took affect this October which was part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act actually has a clause that states:

as a method for banks to go over the interchange fee cap if they implement said fraud prevention technologies outlined by the US gov't.

Of course as this pertains to debit interchange fees, this is limited to debit cards, but considering that debit cards can be treated like a credit card as it is today by swiping and signing; the momentum to push for EMV cards is plausible from Durbin.

You can read about the said analysis here: Why The Fed Should Use Durbin To Push EMV

In addition to that, we also have VISA announces plan to drive chip card and mobile payment adoption by providing incentives such as waiving the cost to renew their PCI-DSS checks for merchants that start installing newer payment terminals that accept both the EMV chip and the VISA PayWave system.


So we do have lots of balls rolling in the background. However, for most US banks, it's still a "wait and see" approach, unless of course a paradigm shift starts to occur. My take is, this seems to be happening too Anyone else seeing increased fraud on cards?

cbn42

The cards may have the chips, but the mag stripes are still the main method of payment, or at least they were when I was there a couple of years ago. I used my US credit card extensively, and no one batted an eye. In fact, I got the feeling that these chips that the banks were putting in the cards were going unused. Maybe they were put into the cards in anticipation?

How has the situation changed in the last two years? Do stores use the chips to read credit cards more often?


Interesting... sounds a lot like many Asian countries, even today.
Out of curiosity, how did people do things like pay rent before internet banking came aabout?

Ragnarok

This might sound kind of silly, but I still want to know.

Does anyone thinks that the chip is kind of ugly?

Some credit cards have nice art designs on the face.

Yet, I think placing the chip on it disturbs the design.

( I am not suggesting this alone is more important than the fraud reduction aspect, but it does bother me )

jamar

I'm of the opinion that it doesn't look bad at all when done right. At least I haven't seen any chip cards that I would regard as aesthetic disasters. Except for one of my UnionPay EMV cards that's got a chip with a ridiculously thin top (brass? gold? Something of that color) layer. It's already worn, and before that, it tarnished within a couple of days of me getting it.

Also, on that note, I've noticed that this card won't play nice with other banks' EMV-capable ATMs.

percysmith

I agree. Even a UK Plat Charge or Centurion with a silver chip doesn't look that bad.

Frequently the Visa/MC logo looks much worse than the chip on the card.