As has been widely reported, Visa has developed the capability to speed up the transaction time at the Point Of Sale (POS) with an EMV chip card. This will be welcomed by consumers and retailers alike who have been voicing concerns that transactions take too long, and the need to leave a card in the terminal makes it seem even longer. Arstechnica provided some of the details:
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. 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.
I would like to see this upgrade in capability required. If not, we are going to be adding another layer of confusion for the cardholder. Not only will they need to figure out if they should “dip” or “swipe”, they will now need to remember if they should “dip and go” or “dip and stay”.
Visa also announced some good new regarding reduced fraud levels at merchants with EMV:
At the same time as Visa’s announcement about Quick Chip, Visa also released statistics (PDF) from its “top five chip-enabled merchants.” Those merchants reported that since they’ve made EMV terminals standard at their stores, they’ve experienced an 18.3 percent drop in fraud from 2014 to 2015
Overview by Sarah Grotta, Director, Debit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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