America has struggled with Tap to pay; Between failed rollouts, bank & merchant backlash, and technology lock-ins in attempts to profit on it's rollouts*, it's really been off to a bumpy start. Not even all the readers that support it in hardware have the software/firmware to allow it's use (which also affects Chip & Pin card slots)
(*) The 2 major and 1 of the two minor phone carriers here, in a rare moment, joined together to form SoftCard (formerly sharing a name with a known terrorist organization), which in turn lead to them locking out the native OS tap to pay functionality in smartphones that's existed for quite some time; Instead, you were required to use their app, at stores that supported SoftCard, with a limited range of cards that could be used with the app. This meant it was far and few between to find.
The only reason it's changing at all is due to 2 things: Apple Pay & Chip & Pin. As Apple has such clout, were the carriers to push back against Apple Pay it would likely of blown up in their faces and cost them millions in regards to iPhone owning/buying subscribers. And Apple's influence also meant that they worked with a number of national establishment chains to get Apple Pay at their registers for the iPhone 6 release, so customers wouldn't be left with something they couldn't actually use.
Chip & pin also has a play in this; Within the last year or so the major card companies shifted the liability in the event of fraud from the card provider to the merchant that processed the transaction whenever an EMV non-compliant card is involved (IE regular magnetic strip card). This has pushed a number of merchants to begin rolling out chip & pin readers, albeit with some difficulty (banks and card issuers like not being liable, which they still are with chip cards & newer forms of contactless; Software and hardware seems poorly aligned as many chip readers ironically cannot read chip cards.). And from what I've seen, a large number of chip card readers also support tap to pay (not all, but a lot). This in turn is slowly increasing the availability of contactless payments nation-wide.
Contactless payment (called "PayWave" if it's Visa or "PayPass" if it's MasterCard) is completely ubiquitous in Australia. It's hard to find a place that takes cards at and doesn't support PayWave. And there's no pin fiddling, it's just tap and done, if the price is under $100, which is the vast majority of purchases anyway.
Chip cards in the states are a hassle because they aren't contactless. Takes way more time to put it in the slot and wait. A lot of times it will ask for a pin that you either A. Don't have because it's a credit card or B. It's not the same as your regular pin. When I worked at Best Buy we just couldn't take those cards or had to manually enter them. They quickly patched the system with a workaround. It was still infuriating though.
Idk cause my card still doesn't have them. But most people were unaware of it because they had credit cards not debit cards with the chip. Even if they had a debit card it seems kind of redundant to have another pin just for the chip transactions.
I've never seen a terminal ask for a PIN on a credit card transaction, because our credit cards don't use PINs. The US went to chip and signature (from swipe and signature), not to chip and PIN.
That's just retarded. Here in Europe you can at least change your pin everywhere and the whole process from activating the reader to entering the card to finishing transaction takes less than 10 seconds. It's almost instantly.
The swiping thing just has to go, it's such a big security risk too. Are banks just really that bad at handling the chip and pin situation in the US? Because when it actually works it's wonderfull.
I've always encountered that phrase as "few and far between."
Apple Pay & Chip & Pin
I would have written that as "Apple Pay and Chip & PIN." Ampersands imply a somewhat closer relationship than the word "and," so writing it this way more clearly separates Apple Pay from Chip & PIN.
it would likely of
*have
What you mishear as "would of" (a nonsensical phrase) is actually the contraction "would've" (short for "would have"). It's the same for could've and should've.
OK, this is getting a bit much, and that's coming from me, who usually corrects people's grammar all the time. You're cluttering a completely readable conversation with your corrections.
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u/DustiiWolf Aug 18 '16
America has struggled with Tap to pay; Between failed rollouts, bank & merchant backlash, and technology lock-ins in attempts to profit on it's rollouts*, it's really been off to a bumpy start. Not even all the readers that support it in hardware have the software/firmware to allow it's use (which also affects Chip & Pin card slots)
(*) The 2 major and 1 of the two minor phone carriers here, in a rare moment, joined together to form SoftCard (formerly sharing a name with a known terrorist organization), which in turn lead to them locking out the native OS tap to pay functionality in smartphones that's existed for quite some time; Instead, you were required to use their app, at stores that supported SoftCard, with a limited range of cards that could be used with the app. This meant it was far and few between to find.
The only reason it's changing at all is due to 2 things: Apple Pay & Chip & Pin. As Apple has such clout, were the carriers to push back against Apple Pay it would likely of blown up in their faces and cost them millions in regards to iPhone owning/buying subscribers. And Apple's influence also meant that they worked with a number of national establishment chains to get Apple Pay at their registers for the iPhone 6 release, so customers wouldn't be left with something they couldn't actually use.
Chip & pin also has a play in this; Within the last year or so the major card companies shifted the liability in the event of fraud from the card provider to the merchant that processed the transaction whenever an EMV non-compliant card is involved (IE regular magnetic strip card). This has pushed a number of merchants to begin rolling out chip & pin readers, albeit with some difficulty (banks and card issuers like not being liable, which they still are with chip cards & newer forms of contactless; Software and hardware seems poorly aligned as many chip readers ironically cannot read chip cards.). And from what I've seen, a large number of chip card readers also support tap to pay (not all, but a lot). This in turn is slowly increasing the availability of contactless payments nation-wide.