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by jumelles 2807 days ago
If this can always process chip cards that quickly, I'm very impressed. Usually it's at least 10 seconds, just standing there staring at the card reader, waiting.
4 comments

I use their current (now prior, I guess) chip reader, and it completes the transaction within just a second or two. Most of my customers are surprised it's so fast, compared to other chip reading registers around town.

That could be because I'm using a cellular internet conneciton however. My town's cable internet is notoriously throttled.

Doesn't it depend on the speed of Internet connection?

Here in Canada, chip terminals often show 'PIN OK' - meaning that the local part of the transaction has been completed - within 1 second but then need 10+ seconds to communicate back to the payment processor.

The average time to complete a scheme card transaction is sub 4 seconds on a lowish-latency network. Any extra time is due to the implementation on the merchant side.
Not just in Terminal, but chip and tap in general:

https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-makes-payments-even-...