To expand on this, ideally you would buy a prepaid chip/pin card issued by an Italian bank. This is the only way to have confidence that your card would be accepted everywhere in Italy.

Travelex sells Euro-denominated prepaid chip-pin cards, but they don't give customers the option of specifying country of issue, so you could go to all the trouble of getting a chip-pin card, and then could be denied anyway.

Some countries have their own domestic electronic purse (Oyster card in the UK, Proton card in Belgium, something else in France..) - and so having a domestic chip-pin card still could be rejected if a merchant is not on a credit card network, and exclusively using the electronic purse.

So, extending that thought, I would need a different card for each country I visited. Is this why we have international standards??
. . . And if I did that with prepaid cards for each country, there would be separate remaining balances, sort of like having books of travelers cheques, each denominated in a different currency.
That would be worse than going back to a separate currency for each country in Europe. Though (hopefully), there is slim chance that would happen.

Chip & PIN is the international standard, and the US banks should embrace it now. After-all, Visa International has announced disincentives for chip & signature processing that go into effect 2015 (I believe), so we know it is only a short-term solution.

The issue is that Visa/MasterCard/AmEx allowed pin & chip only kiosks. They should have mandated that readers be able to accept pin & chip, pin & signature, or magnetic stripes. As they phase out the normal magnetic stripes, the machines already could read the chips, but until all banks/countries change over then everything would work everywhere.

They do. Except the manufacturers of the said kiosks and the organizations that opted to install said chip only kiosks could careless because 99.9% of the kiosk users have an EMV chip card and it's only the rare 0.01% occurrence are Americans who only have a mag-stripe card. And what's the penalty? Probably very low enough to warrant it.

Why should the manufacturers and organizations spend more or whatever it costs to ensure it takes an old technology like a mag-stripe which has the risk of having skimming devices installed on top of them by fraudsters? Why should they be held hostage to the stupidity of American banks that refuse to issue hybrid cards to their cardholders?

Overall, it's the matter of the size of the market.

If VISA mandates that kiosks in Italy should have the ability to process mag-stripes as well as the chip or face the penalty of $5 for every occurrence that it doesn't, but if every Italian has a chip-and-pin card, and pretty much every Canadian, Japanese, German, or any other non-American cardholder that visits Italy has a chip-and-PIN card, why should they spend more to ensure that it takes an ancient technology like the mag-stripe as well? Oops, that's right there's that 0.01% of American tourists to Italy that don't have hybrid cards. Well, sucks to be them and their backwards banks, we'll just eat up the EUR 5 fine.

The payment systems in Europe are often running on local (country wide) enterprises and often Visa/MasterCard is bypassed when local issued card are used. So Visa / MasterCard doesn't have a choice. Either they follow the guidelines of the local enterprises or they can leave the market. In other words, there are no fines for not accepting mag stripe cards as Visa and MasterCard simply don't have the power.

Or we can have a system like Bank of China where you can apply for full credit cards issued by its Hong Kong division from head office. BoC China's risk department approves you, then BoC Hong Kong issues the card and services it with the option to pay your bill while... Not in Hong Kong. So, for an equivalent hypothetical example, Chase USA could look you over, tell Chase Canada "this person's OK, issue him/her a card", and you get a Canadian Chip+PIN card to properly cover that particular base with the ability to pay it off at Chase USA.

I think that would be difficult to do. At least for PRC/HKSAR, they are now essentially the same country so technically the same laws apply.

Between Canada/US, now that's a whole different picture. Maybe it'll work for their own cards like Chase Sapphire, but for co-branded cards it maybe difficult; would Chase Canada's EMV card suppliers even have the artwork, designs, and prints for say, an United card that's issued by Chase USA?

Likewise, what in the case of British Airways co-branded credit cards? Can Chase USA even ask Chase Canada to make them on behalf of their American cardholders when British Airways co-branded cards in Canada are issued by a rival company, RBC? That could be risky; RBC can sue Chase Canada for breaching a contract which lets RBC co-brand their cards with BA in Canada, even though the cards are issued on behalf of Chase Canada to Chase USA cardmembers.

Indeed you do -- if you insist on being able to use plastic at all kiosks in every country.

You have little choice here. Either you acquire the local cards, or you compromise and accept that your cannot have plastic for every machine that accepts a card.

Expecting a bank in any one country to adopt every standard used in every country globally, and then also subscribe and secure access to every payment network in every country for every type of payment system is unreasonable.

Or are you suggesting forcing all countries to adopt a single solution?
Every international standard serves a different purpose. What international standard are you thinking of?

I hope you're not thinking Visa -- that's not a "standard", it's just a private company that implements its own proprietary system. An American Express card will not work on the Visa network, even if the technology were to be completely aligned.

You cannot expect anything more if you insist on having the convenience of plastic at every pos terminal.

I'm not sure if you're aware that the euro was not implemented to make things easy for tourists. This is an incidental benefit -- and in the end it may not even be that. The Euro is a huge problem that has put Europe at risk of going down with Greece, Italy, and Spain. It's putting a massive stress on the financial system, forcing bailouts that would otherwise be unnecessary, potentially beyond what's even affordable. If it takes its full-toll on Europe, national currencies will not only make a comeback, but the magnitude of damage will trivilize what any shred of convenience it brought.

On what basis? Far fewer machines accept chip and pin than magstripe, obviously.

Americans have no idea where the division is when their magstripe is rejected. Technology is the least of the problems when most of the worlds machines will read magstripes. Standardizing the technology is only a fraction of the problem. What happens when you insert your chip-pin visa card into an Oyster card reader? It makes no difference when the technology is aligned if the payment system is not compatible.

How would you think an international technology standard would force Luigi's Pizza Pub in Italy to subscribe to and accept the terms of the particular network your bank in the US has decided to subscribe to?

That scenario does not enable Chase to make the guarantee that TravelPlan was talking about. Such a card as you describe could only be guaranteed to work in a single country (China), which goes back to the guarantee TravelPlan was criticizing. In fact, such a card could not be guaranteed to work in the homeland.. because it would be seen as a Chinese card, and a US merchant could reject it on that basis.

VISA/MC/AMEX advertises "accepted in millions in places worldwide whereever they carry our logo" not "theoretically accepted in millions in places worldwide where our logo is carried with the exception of different international standards of using varying technologies ranging from old embossed numbers carbon-copy imprinters, magnetic stripe proccessing, Chip-and-PIN, Chip-and-Signature, contactless payWave/PayPass/ExpressPay technology and may not work at unattended kiosks despite that it carries our logo, etc..."

If consumers hear "accepted in millions in places worldwide where our logo is carried" that's what consumers expect. If VISA/MC/AMEX advertises that slogan, then the ball is in their court to make good on that promise.

"Millions" of places isn't good enough for some people - hence the thread. Millions of merchants accept magstripe, but as you can see, TravelPlan finds it insufficient if he can find one vendor who won't accept it.

Personally, I don't find monopolies (or anything sufficiently similar to a monopoly) to be good for the economy.

The false advertising matter is separate, and we probably agree on it. I oppose false advertising and have the same expectation in this respect. At a minimum, there should be a different trademark for EMV-only acceptance (or more specifically, in all cases where a merchant will refuse a card with that logo - even if the refusal is not on a technological basis but rather a geographical basis).

HK's banking system is still segregated from the mainland (technically, HK rules are supposed to be "no HKID, no card" with exceptions here and there... Like this one) which is why I looked at it as a viable example. And following the BoC China/BoCHK example, they actually have a separate set of cards for issuance under this scheme with points exchangable for miles at the big PRC airlines as well as Cathay instead of separate co-branded cards like the ones BoC China issues on its own. So under this idea, Chase Canada would have separate "general cards" with exchangable points instead of directly co-branding.

And as for Gary, yes, this would only cover the base of "we can't take your card because it's not Chip+PIN". We can tackle this issue before we tackle the "it's foreign, we won't take it" issue because it's less of a headache to remedy. Also, the BoC cards I mention were specifically made to work outside China. "Inside" cards run on a different network (a monopoly in that the "outside" networks aren't allowed to issue cards denominated in local currency) with an imposed deadline of 2015 for chip implementation.

While there are ISO standards for EMV (Chip & PIN), I was indeed thinking of Visa, or more specifically Visa International http://http://corporate.visa.com, of which Visa Inc is the US arm and Visa Europe is the one Italy is part of. If you want to put a Visa logo on your product, card or kiosk, you must agree to conform to Visa's published bylaws an operating regulations. That's pretty much the definition of a standard according to Webster: "something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality".

My old company used to print those Visa Bylaws & Operating Regulations and distribute them to member banks and payment processing companies around the globe. It was a three-volume set (probably distributed on CD today) that was 1300+ pages defining everything from the Visa logo, to card dimensions & processing procedures, to defining the maximum $$ transaction amount "floor limits" by industry & country that could be processed without Visa's approval.

Visa is a standard that does define Chip & Pin usage and processing (drawing on ISO 7816), as well as the interim Chip & Signature. TrenItalia displays the Visa logo and they will have to conform to the standard along with the rest of Italy and the USA.

Visa does have "a big hammer" to enforce the migration to true EMV Chip & Pin that begins phasing-in next year. After October 2015, banks or processors that do not accept Visa conforming EMV cards assume all fraud liability for signature transactions that they do accept. See: http://www.bankrate.com/financing/cr...-credit-cards/ It will probably happen earlier across Europe.
MasterCard is headed down a similar path.

So what this all means, is that for cards carrying the Visa logo, or restaurants and trains that want to continue accepting them (or MasterCard for that matter), the days of chip & signature are numbered. (Signature cards do have a significantly higher rate of fraud compared to chip & pin.)

In that case I'd love to know how Visa Japan functions in the context of Visa International. In the words of someone, "water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink". Visa logos on practically every ATM in the country but "Japan-issued cards only" in fine print and something about VJA. How are they allowed to do that? And to say nothing of Visa Touch, which is incompatible with the PayWave the rest of the world uses.

This is great news. I wasn't aware one of the big credit card processors was setting such a deadline. I really hope this means companies start putting out more cards and quick. I have a lot of UK travel next year planned and I'm actually a bit worried about the lack of a chip and pin card.

If something doesn't change soon I'll just have to go for the new Chase BA card.