[jltsiren]

Chip and signature, which often means just the chip without further authentication.

EMV has multiple options. Many countries (including the US) chose the signature option for credit cards for convenience and use PINs only with debit cards. Before contactless payment apps became common, that was a major source of friction when using American credit cards in Europe.

[Aloha]

I'd argue we picked it for legacy reasons - Americans are not used to the chip/pin concept, and adopted EMV very late because of a variety of legacy reasons (massive installed base of mag stripe equipment, and systems to deal with the inherent slightly higher fraud).

[avianlyric]

No the US stuck with signature for profit and cultural reasons. Europe also had a huge install of mag stripe equipment, and has the same fraud systems, what else do you think Europe was using before EMV was developed?

But Chip-and-PIN makes using credit cards marginally less convenient, and forces people to authenticate themselves to perform transactions, unlike swipes and signatures, something that many Americans don't like. The US is happy with crazy high fraud rates, and crazy high interchange rates (fees for using credit cards). Those interchange rates also fund all the fancy points and rewards programs in the US, and primarily are paid for by the poorest in society (who can't access those programs, but are still paying the interchange rates). Plus high interchange rates mean more money for banks and the card networks themselves.

The EU on the other hand capped interchange rates, so either banks had to get fraud under control, or pay for fraud out of their own pockets. I'll give you two guess which route they chose.

[account42]

> But Chip-and-PIN makes using credit cards marginally less convenient

Only because they chose to require the PIN every time. They could have instead have it depend on transaction amount and amount/transactions/time since the last PIN check like what we have for contactless now.

[Aloha]

legacy reasons = cultural reasons

Americans are not used to the pin concept.

The legacy reasons are part of why we waited so long to adopt EMV - my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.

I dont disagree with you about interchange rates etc - we should cap them - but as a high earner I'm also going to maximize what I can from that system while I can ;-)

[avianlyric]

> Americans are not used to the pin concept.

Nobody was. That's what happens when something new is invented, nobody is familiar with it until they're educated. Nobody in Europe were not used to the pin concept when Chip & PIN was originally created (except of course for access to ATMs, which I assume also existed in the US).

> my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.

I don't know why you think Europe was any different, credit card adoption and acceptance in Europe matched that of the US in the 90s. Europe did take longer to hit the same levels of adoption as the US, but remember credit cards have been around since the 1950s, and were computerised in the 1970s. By the time you get to the 1990s, credit cards were pretty much ubiquitous across the entire western world. The US wasn't some futuristic bastion of banking technologies, if any thing, it was starting to fall behind. Today, US banking systems look comically outdated compared to anything you find in Europe.

Your "belief" for the reasons US banking tech lags so far behind the rest of the world are pretty easy to disprove with some fairly superficial research.

[Aloha]

My point is we (in north america) often seem retain outdated technology because of early adopter problems - be it the T1 vs E1 conversation, how credit cards are processed, all of it. We tend to adopt V1 of a technology and have too much of an installed base to easily adopt the considerably improved V2.

[avianlyric]

And my point is that V1 technology for credit cards happened in the 1950s, V2 in the 1970s and by the time chip and pin came around, credit cards were hardly new technology anywhere in the western world.

Claiming that the US had too large of an install base for chip and pin to work would be like claiming the US had too large of a propeller air craft install base to adopt jet engines (also developed in Europe), but somehow the US managed that transition just fine. Americas failure to adopt chip and pin has nothing to do with legacy, and everything to do with US culture has a different relationship which money and how it’s spent.

In Europe people generally expect to be challenged when spending money using credit cards, and that’s always been true. So chip and PIN was always an easy to sell to consumers. In the US, people simply don’t expect to be challenged, and even get up upset when challenged, when using a credit card. So selling chip and PIN to consumers is much harder, especially when the US so happy to accept exploitative banking practices, and crazy high fraud rates.