Smart credit cards, or chip cards, were popular in Europe long before they debuted in the U.S. Here, financial institutions were complacent and believed\u00a0that existing technology was secure.<\/p>\n
Now\u00a0chip\u00a0cards use integrated circuits to provide greatly enhanced security. One common problem they are designed to circumvent is credit card skimming, a process that hacks a card reader and grabs your card\u00a0information. It’s particularly vexing and the data even includes your debit card’s pin number, which grants access to all of the\u00a0money in that account.<\/p>\n
That situation began to change\u00a0in 2014, when tens of millions of credit cards were compromised due to high-profile break-ins at a number of merchants, including Target.\u00a0As an occasional Target customer, this was particularly disconcerting, and it so happens that one of my bank accounts was compromised, but not until the following year. The bank wasn’t terribly informative about where and how the intrusion occurred \u2014 so I’m not certain it was the result of the Target intrusion \u2014 and I didn’t lose any money as a result. Still, American banks are now\u00a0rushing to incorporate the technology into their cards.<\/p>\n
Without going into details, I have one debit card without chip support. But my wife, who has an account at\u00a0a different bank that she shares with our son, received a chip card on the last revision.<\/p>\n
The extra security is welcome, and I’m awaiting for my bank to replace my debit card with one that has the chip. However, the price of security means that transactions can be awkward. The price of safety I fear, and those of you in the U.S. with chip cards will understand. I’m not at all sure how well it works in Europe.<\/p>\n
Take a typical purchase at Walmart, which recently upgraded its point-of-sale terminals to support both chips and Walmart Pay. The latter is their answer to Apple Pay and is evidently meant to replace\u00a0the failed CurrentC mobile payment technology. It uses a QR code and a special Walmart app to make and record your purchases. Since I haven’t tried it, I cannot attest to its ease of use, but it does appear to be clumsier\u00a0than Apple Pay, which requires an iPhone with an NFC chip or an Apple Watch.<\/p>\n
In any case, on a recent visit to Walmart, I took my wife’s debit card with me. If you’ve used one, you’ll realize that you no longer swipe the card. Instead, you insert the left edge of the card into a special slot at the bottom of the terminal. Rather than remove the card once it’s read, the chip card must stay\u00a0in the terminal until the transaction is concluded, and the processing steps\u00a0can be fairly sluggish compared to a\u00a0regular credit card.<\/p>\n
When I went to my wife’s bank to withdraw some money via an ATM machine, I got to see further downsides to the process. While some banks swallow your debit card whole, other financial institutions allow you to insert the card and remove it as soon as it’s read. But not so with a chip card.\u00a0Rather than withdraw the card, once again it has to remain inserted until the final step in the\u00a0transaction. You have to wait extra minutes as the\u00a0ATM slogs through the process. Worse, the bank my wife uses still has a message on the screen saying you should just insert and remove the card from the reader even though that’s not correct\u00a0when you use the chip card.<\/p>\n
Ah, the price of security.<\/p>\n
While I welcome the added protections \u2014 who wouldn’t? \u2014 I do not welcome the clumsy way in which the technology has been implemented in this country. Even when a bank’s information menus appear to have been modernized somewhat beyond\u00a0the 1990’s Windows-style interface that many display, it does seem as if the ATM’s microprocessors are barely able to cope with chip cards.<\/p>\n
I would like to believe that this is just a first generation technology, that, as ATM interfaces, many of which are based on Windows, improve, things will get decidedly better. It does seem\u00a0as if the chip card technology has been tacked on, rather than developed from the ground up. That will hardly convince customers to want to stick with the chip cards, not that they necessarily have a choice once a new card is issued.<\/p>\n
Oh, and I checked\u00a0my bank’s site, and they do offer chip cards. While I’m not enamored of the technology, or its lack of performance, having been bitten by fake charges a time or two, I would prefer to enhance the protection, so I plan to\u00a0request one. True, the bank supports Apple Pay, and those transactions are reasonably swift, but few of the merchants I deal with have opted to work with Apple. I suppose that’ll change some day, since the Apple Pay user base and merchant support continues to grow. In saying that, though, it does appear that, after trying the system a few times, some customers\u00a0prefer to return to the credit card since they prefer to pull out a card rather than schlepp an\u00a0iPhone out of their\u00a0pocket or purse. Well, there’s always an Apple Watch, but the user base is still quite small.<\/p>\n
The message here is that extra security for your bank or credit cards is important, but when the process of using them becomes cumbersome, customer adoption will be slow. But this is a U.S.-centric view. I would love to hear from our readers in Europe\u00a0about their experiences with chip cards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Smart credit cards, or chip cards, were popular in Europe long before they debuted in the U.S. Here, financial institutions were complacent and believed\u00a0that existing technology was secure. Now\u00a0chip\u00a0cards use integrated circuits to provide greatly enhanced security. One common problem they are designed to circumvent is credit card skimming, a process that hacks a card […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[202,14809,14806,14534,15824,15825,14866,15826,26,15828,15690,15823,9122,14306,15827,8020],"class_list":["post-25910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-apple","tag-apple-pay","tag-apple-watch","tag-atm","tag-chip-card","tag-credit-card","tag-currentc","tag-debit-card","tag-iphone","tag-nfc-chip","tag-qr-code","tag-smart-credit-card","tag-target","tag-walmart","tag-walmart-pay","tag-windows"],"yoast_head":"\n