Hacker News Reader

Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

No sooner would a coffee shop be seen without a Square reader and an Edison bulb

I'm not so sure about that. I'd agree that they all have "fancy" (for want of a better word) payment systems, but I don't think there's a reason they have to be the fancy ones made by Square.

But more importantly: the US is (finally) moving to chipped and tap-to-pay transactions. That means that pretty much all merchant hardware is going to need to be replaced over time, so the market the Square (and everyone else) currently has is up for grabs. If I were looking at investing in Square that would make me nervous.

View on HN

I have a quick question about this - there is exactly one business in my area that has actually switched over to chipped cards, and that's Home Depot. Everyone else goes "lol we don't do that, use the magnetic swipe like a normal person" when I try it. I thought that the adoption date was in October, and seeing as how everyone has the machines already... what the hell is going on?

Merchants can continue to accept mag stripe transactions but they do so at their own risk. Failing to switch to EMV by the switchover date in October means that any fraud that occurs via a non-EMV transaction is now the merchant's liability. Instead of credit card companies and banks eating the losses from fraud, the individual merchant eats it now.

There's an interesting set of incentives at play. The October deadline was actually a shift in liability - now businesses still using swipe transactions will become liable for any losses due to fraudulent transactions, while the card companies will continue to be liable for chipped ones.

Beyond that I don't know too much - maybe the price of the hardware is such that it makes sense to risk it for a little while before buying a chip-capable machine (do people lease them?). The part I really don't understand is that there are businesses with chipped terminals that still insist on you swiping, I can't work out why they'd want that at all.

C&P seems noticeably slower than magnetic stripe at the moment. Possibly due to stores still running their POS on PSTN connections. I wouldn't be surprised if some places were still using stripes to avoid slowdowns at checkout.

Liability was to switchover from the issuer to the merchants' processors (banks) in October, so that was the big push, to off-set liabilities. My experience is about 25% require Chip and PIN.

Some consumers are registering complaints about slow lines due to C&P[1] most of it due to longer C&P processing time.

[1]http://security.itbusinessnet.com/article/One-in-Five-Consum...

I was just at a coffeeshop today in SF that had a chip reader and it seemed to be plugged into a Square register.

Square has had chip readers for a little while now and they are pretty cheap too --> https://squareup.com/shop/reader . One of my favorite bars is already using it. Why would someone switch away from square if they are happy with it and there is a cheap upgrade path to support chip readers? Switching services potentially costs time...I can't imagine people wanting to spend that time unless they were inherently unhappy with square.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com