There has been a lot of discussion about Americans using credit cards in Europe, for example, and the occasional difficulty in using cards with only a magnetic stripe when sometimes a chip and pin is required, such as at a vending machine for tickets or an unstaffed gas pump.

But how does this work in reverse? Suppose a European comes to the U.S. Are there any difficulties in using a chip and pin card in the U.S.?

No. Chip & pin cards also have a regular stripe on the back which can be used. These can be used in the US and other machines that can't accept the chip. Requires a signature.

This:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/credi...signature.html

is the main thread on the subject.

In there, you will find that it generally works, with the exception of a very few misconfigured point-of-sale terminals which recognize that it's a chip card, demand that you insert it instead of swiping it, but then don't read the chip once you insert it.

One situation would be if there is a power or telecom outage. Occasionally I've encountered a situation where a merchant will want to take the physical imprint of the card numbers - just like as if it were 30 years ago. If you don't have those raised numbers, that's not going to work...

This happened to me during a hurricane. All telecoms/ATMs knocked out, so had to pay hotel bill with an imprinter.

Most American chip cards don't require a pin. At least visa and AmEx don't when using the machines in Europe. They are automatically entered. BP gas stations here in US did have problems but have heard they fixed that

Very good responses.

So, why don't all card issuers in the US just start issuing all new cards with the chip and pin or chip and signature features, beginning now?

Since they would continue to have a magnetic strip, it doesn't seem like there would be any downside.

There's a discussion of that in the US EMV thread mentioned above. Seems to be some combination of cost + Americans don't care because we don't visit foreign countries + we fear technology.

Wall Street Journal article yesterday illustrates how expensive chip cards are...

...and that's only for the cards. There's no benefit to having the chip in the card until you have the infrastructure to process the transactions using the chips, and that's still a few years away.

It's starting. Most merchants have to October 2015 to be able to take EMV, otherwise they are responsible for fraud; Gas stations have until October 2017.

For reference

CSP's numbers are still a bit raised but I don't know if it will work for those purposes. Now that you bring up raised numbers, I remember back in 2008 or so a store's CC machine was not working one morning and I bought $200 worth of product. I never saw the charge show up for months and months. 3 months, 6 months... people told me to cancel the card already. Still nothing. Ten and a half months later... bam. I almost forgot about that charge!

I suspect mostly cost. For the card issuers, to manufacture chip cards costs a lot more than a standard card. So the banks need to be convinced that the amount of fraud reduction would outweigh the costs of manufacturing the chip cards. Also, retailers would require equipment to read chip cards. Since its the card issuers - and not retailers - that cover fraudulent activities - I suspect retailers are reluctant to pay for new equipment for a system that would put the onus on them for this. As for fraud prevention - I admit I don't know how much chip typically prevents. I admit I'm not a regular reader of the CC forums though. Is there proof that it has significantly reduced CC fraud?

Also don't know about Europe - but in Canada, they were obviously pretty convinced of the benefits. Believe retailers were given incentives by the banks to upgrade to the chip card readers that are wireless. Definitely part of that is the transaction charge - retailers there now pay a bigger fee to the banks if they swipe instead of use the chip.

As for the US, my CSP card is now chip - but chip and signature. While there are definitely other US-based chip and signature cards, not sure if there are many, if any, chip/pin cards issued in the US. Also read somewhere that the large Target hack may be the turning point in the drive to get chip cards as the US standard. Basically, the reading went something like while the use of chip cards would not have prevented the data breach itself, it would have prevented the ability for the perpetrators to produce cards using the stolen data.