Today, all stores in the US should accept chip-and-PIN cards. Yeah, right.

(credit: Dennis S. Hurd)

Way back in 2012, MasterCard and Visa agreed that by October 1, 2015, every retailer in the United States would have to have new terminals that would accept chip-and-PIN cards, like those that were found in most of Europe, as well as in Australia, Brazil, and a variety of other countries. Those countries ditched magnetic stripe cards, like the ones the US uses primarily today, more than a decade ago to mitigate credit card fraud.

October 1, 2015 is now upon us and the changeover to chip cards in the US is patchwork at best. Over the last ten years, comparatively lower levels of credit card fraud in this country dampened any momentum that an upgrade had—if banks weren’t losing money hand over fist, it was easier not to have to reeducate customers on how to use a credit card.

Even on the due date for the upgrade to the so-called EMV standard (named for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa, the card networks that developed the standard over a decade ago), that logic remains. It has been estimated that only 40 percent of cardholders in the US have EMV-compliant credit cards.

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