Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

The US does a lot of swipe+pin or just swipe, but the EMV process itself takes a long time (regardless of a PIN or signing afterwards):

http://www.lowcards.com/emv-transactions-slow-37884

Compared to Apple/Android Pay it's painfully slow, but it's also noticeably slower than swiping.

View on HN

Yup. Comment below yours says EMV is fast, but it's just not. You need to stand there and wait with your card in the read for for the processing step. Maybe not 5 seconds, but a non-trivial amount of time. With a swipe, you'd have your card back in your wallet as the authentication was completing.

If we had chip+pin it would be a different story, but because we have to sign, the EMV+sign process is slower than swipe+sign.

That page is just plain wrong. You can put the card into a reader, type your PIN in, and get your card back almost straight away. 5 seconds is possible if you don't forget your PIN!

The process can be slower if the retailer uses an older system that hasn't got a permanent network connection. With some ancient terminals, you could hear a modem dialing up and talking to the bank. That was slow, but luckily those kind of terminals are now rare.

When swiping, my process is: swipe, put card back in wallet, put wallet back in pocket, wait for transaction to complete, go. (About 90% of my card transactions don't require a signature, because they're below the threshold for that.)

When using a chip, my process is: insert card, wait for transaction to complete, remove card, put everything away, go.

You'll notice that putting stuff away happens in parallel with the transaction in the first case, but they're in series in the second case.

It may be reasonably quick, but it's still noticeably slower than swiping. It's not a big deal, but it's just one of those little annoyances.

This is anecdotal, of course - but it's been much slower than swiping at every store I've used it at. These stores were using the exact same terminals for swiping just a few months ago, so it's not the network. Hopefully it's just crappy hardware in the terminals that's not optimized for EMV.

Edit: Swiping used to take 1-2 seconds to process, EMV seems to take about 10.

That page is specifically talking about EMV in the US, and for whatever reason, I've never seen a EMV 'dip' that takes less than 5-10 seconds here. Target for example has consistently been around 10 seconds every time I've used EMV there and I doubt they are using dial-up.

I've yet to have to put in a pin when I've used my chipped credit card in the US. In fact, I don't even know what the pins are on my credit card, just my debit/atm card.

Worse yet, not all the chip enabled readers have the chip part enabled. So you can stick your card in, wait, and then realize you have to swipe. Otherwise, you swipe, get the suprisingly aggressive BZZZRT sound, and then use the chip reader and wait at least 5 seconds while it authenticates.

I'll time it at the local Target. It's slow.

It's not wrong, it really is slow. It may be different in other places, but in the US it is slow. Still depends on the store (besides network connections there are tons of different hardware setups), but it is never as fast as swiping.

In terms of speed from fastest to slowest: Apple/Adroid, swipe, swipe and sign, swipe and PIN, dip and sign.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com