Why You Still Can’t Use a Chip Card Everywhere

Re:Why You Still Can’t Use a Chip Card Everywhere by ubernostrum on Monday July 25, 2016 @05:26AM (#12157451)

At first because the incentive wasn't there; merchants -- who'd be the ones needing to set up chip-enabled terminals -- didn't bear the cost of fraudulent purchases.

Last year, the major card issuers changed their contract terms to impose the cost of fraud on the merchant if the merchant didn't have a chip-enabled terminal, but:

1. Merchants are suing to have this overturned because they don't want to pay for an upgrade if they can get a court to force the old terms to stay in place, and

2. They're pushing hard on a narrative of "chip transactions are slow, so slow, you have to wait so long because it's so slow, wouldn't you rather just swipe your card quickly than deal with the slow slowness of these slow chips with their slow transactions, and did we mention they're slow" to try to turn the public against chip cards.

3. Probably the next big upgrade will actually be to support NFC-enabled devices like cell phones, bypassing the need for a separate physical card entirely.

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Re:Why You Still Can’t Use a Chip Card Everywhere by tzs on Monday July 25, 2016 @07:44AM (#12157969)

> Merchants are suing to have this overturned because they don't want to pay for an upgrade if they can get a court to force the old terms to stay in place

I haven't seen those. Which merchants are involved?

The lawsuits I've seen over chip cards were merchants who want to switch and are upset either because the card consortium is being too slow, or because the merchants want to require PINs and the card companies won't allows that:

• B&R Supermarket. Bought new NCR Equinox L5300 terminals to be ready for chip cards well before the deadline, installed them, trained their staff, and asked the card network consortium for certification. Liability shift deadline came but the consortium has not certified B&R yet, and now B&R is getting hit by a lot of fraud and chargeback charges that they had not suffered before. They are annoyed that the same group that is taking so long to certify them is also the group the benefits from the liability shift, and so are suing.

• Home Depot. They have upgraded their terminals to accept chip cards, but want to require PINs reather than signatures. Suing to try to force the card companies to allow that.

• Walmart is suing Visa over the same issue.

• Kroger. Same issue.

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Re:Why You Still Can’t Use a Chip Card Everywhere by hsod on Monday July 25, 2016 @11:37AM (#12159370)

> 2. They're pushing hard on a narrative of "chip transactions are slow, so slow, you have to wait so long because it's so slow, wouldn't you rather just swipe your card quickly than deal with the slow slowness of these slow chips with their slow transactions, and did we mention they're slow" to try to turn the public against chip cards.

Well... chip transactions are slow. I'd estimate about 3x slower than the old swipe transactions. It's a genuine annoyance and lots of people complain about it, customers and merchants alike.

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