(credit: Fábio Goveia)
On Tuesday, credit card network Visa announced plans to offer an update to Point of Sale (POS) systems to make using an EMV chip-enabled card faster at the checkout line. (EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the creators of the credit card specification.) Visa is calling the new specification “Quick Chip,” and it says it will bring the time it takes for a terminal to read the card’s chip down to two seconds.
Those seconds mean something. In 2014, Ars argued that the inconvenience of a few extra seconds caused by dipping a card in the terminal at a checkout stand would drive people to use mobile payments like Apple Pay and Android Pay more often. Those payment platforms rely on EMV’s Near Field Communication (NFC) standard, and transactions are much faster because of it. Although it's hard to say if such a shift in preference is occurring, especially with the uneven rollout of EMV-capable terminals, customers trying to use chip cards must dip them into a checkout terminal and leave them there while the transaction is being processed—a serious change of pace and potential source of frustration for Americans used to the speed of swiping a magnetic stripe card.
That time barrier, as well as the fear that customers might be confused as to how to use a chip card, caused merchants to postpone upgrading their terminals to support the EMV standard over the holidays, traditionally the most important time for businesses. But magnetic stripe cards are very fraud-prone, and EMV cards are less so (although not entirely fraud-proof), so card networks are insisting that it’s time to make the change.
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