EMV's Broken Promises In The US

By Nikki Baird, RSR Research

At the end of October I am traveling to Amsterdam to speak at a conference. In preparation for the trip I called the two companies that have issued me credit cards that I plan to use on the trip: American Express and Chase. While on the phone telling them that I was traveling abroad and didn’t want to get hung up with any fraud protection for transactions on my trip, it occurred to me that this might be an opportunity to get a jump on EMV, otherwise known as “chip and PIN”. What followed, in both cases, has proven to me that EMV is seriously at risk in the US. You can point fingers at retailers, you can talk all you want about ignorant consumers who don’t care because they’re not liable. And all I will say is that the problem is much deeper than that. And for that, I blame the banks. The card issuers. Here’s why.

American Express

I called American Express first. I’ve had a card from American Express with a chip in it for I don’t know how long. Two years, maybe? They sent it to me out of the blue, saying they had noted enough international travel activity on my account that I might find a chip-enabled card useful.

I used the card for the first time at an El Corte Ingles in Madrid, Spain. Happy to finally join the rest of the modern world, I slipped my American Express card into the chip reader, and then realized the major flaw in this plan: my card is not chip and PIN. It’s chip and signature. So the cashier looked blankly at me while I did not enter a PIN, and I mimed signing a receipt. “Firma,” I said, as the line stacked up behind me. “Necessito firmar.” After a few more minutes of alternating between that and pointing at the receipt that the POS terminal had already spit out, she got it. She pulled the receipt, dug around for a pen, and I signed. As I left, I saw her staring at the signed receipt like she’d never seen anything like it before. She probably had not.

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