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Comment by richardknop | Hacker News Reader

In Europe processing cards with chip & PIN at POS is quite fast. It usually takes 2-3 seconds for me before "Approved" appears on the reader screen. This might have something to do with US retailers still running legacy POS terminals / tech.

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Yes indeed, I don't really get this post, it takes around 2 seconds to validate the transaction, is that slow? And you have contactless for small amounts as well which is instant.

Chip readers were incredibly slow when they were first rolled out in Europe, too. Stores would tape over the chip slot and put on a note saying "Wipe instead".

Maybe I'm just showing my age here, but if it were a hardware problem, it seems weird that the US would still have the launch woes Europe had over ten years ago.

I work near a Chase building which has a cafeteria in the basement open to everyone. Every checkout register there still hasn't moved their readers to chip transactions. They have 40+ floors of Chase above them and this is happening. It's ridiculous and telling of the U.S. chip reader rollout.

I ate there today at lunch. I pulled out my phone to do Apple Pay at the register and... nope not supported either. In the Chicago HQ of Americas #2 retail bank!

The US banks have been talking about "smart cards" and updating payment tech for 25 years, but from what I see they've only been talking...

Stores in the US do that here now. It's also incredibly annoying when it tells you to insert the chip and then decide "oh THAT's how you want to pay? Swipe it instead" after telling you to insert it.

Not to mention that some of the higher-volume corner stores in my area still use the magnetic stripe reader. So the interaction usually has me inserting my card, the cashier noticing, telling me to swipe instead, and going from there.

So unless I'm going to a big retailer (rare) or the stores directly around work/home, the interaction is usually complicated and annoying for human factors layered on top of the complicated, annoying, and insecure chip+sig protocol the banks settled on because chip+pin was too annoying.

This is why we can't have nice things.

> it seems weird that the US would still have the launch woes Europe had over ten years ago

Ha. That doesn't surprise me at all - "It's too hard or expensive for the US to change compared to other nations" is not an uncommon argument for opponents of change.

It used to drive me insane when I first moved here now but is now one of the quirks I love about the US - people aren't Luddites they just really value a national sense of individualism and urge to seek their own solutions!

Explains why the US still has the penny. Canada removed it (back when CAD was on par with USD!) and I haven't missed it.

>Stores would tape over the chip slot and put on a note saying "Wipe instead".

I don't know about the EU, but US stores did this too. It has nothing to do with chip transactions being slow though. My chip card will not work when swiped at a chip-enabled PoS terminal. The issue, in the US at least, is that stores updated the physical terminal before (sometimes long before) enabling chip transactions at the processor level.

2 or 3 seconds feels like an eternity compared to the old "swipe and done" you used to have with credit cards.

There are places where it takes most of a minute or longer, somehow.

A lot of terminals are that fast but even a few seconds feels like forever compared with swiping and it going through instantaneously.

Yes. All my EU bank cards also support contactless payment. But there is a limit over which you have to enter PIN to approve transaction. But small purchases like coffee at Starbucks I just touch my card with the card reader and it instantly approves. Taking money from ATM always requires PIN though.

In the UK not only is the contactless payment instantly (I think less than a second, probably even better) approved but for the cards that I have in my apple wallet I get the push notification with the payment details in about the same time. And this is actual physical card payment not apple pay. It means that all the other background systems that are needed to trigger and deliver push notifications (over mobile network) are incredibly fast as well.

Here in Japan I get my payment notification email before the terminal is handed back to me with chip payments.

To be fair contactless payments are just as fast in the US. Its just the chip that is slow here.

Since I'm outside the US and couldn't find that info in the thread - just how slow these payments are? To me, waiting these 2 seconds for confirmation already seems slow.

At Lowes (a big box hardware store) in a major US city, I'd say consistently 3-5 seconds.

Caveat that perceptually this seems like a lot longer due to the variable action flow (sometimes sign, sometimes take card immediately, sometimes error) that demands attention.

Sometimes 10-15 seconds.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but contactless in the US is fast because it generally transmits magstripe data.

Apple/Samsung/NFC Pay is not mag stripe. It is generally faster than a chip card.

Apple and Android Pay are not mag stripe, they're proper encrypted nfc payments. Samsung pay CAN be a magstripe emulation, for terminals that don't support NFC.

To clarify, EMV supports tokenized transactions that emulate the _contents_ of the magnetic stripe over NFC, and this is what is broadly used in the US.

Note here[0] that Chase states that only contactless MSD support (contactless magstripe emulation over NFC with a dynamically-generated security code) is required for Apple Pay; a subset of contactless EMV.

[0] https://www.chasepaymentech.com/developercenter/applepaymode...

I think rhodysurf means swiping the magentic strip on the back of the card, not contactless payment.

I pay with my watch or phone when i can actually because that is faster than both swiping or putting the chip in.

But yes, my original comment was talking about swiping the card using the mag strip.

Ah I see. Yes we don't swipe mag strip in Europe. The only time somebody asked me to swipe my card was on my vacation in Asia. That was first time I needed to do that and they also asked for my signature which surprised me as it was first time in my life I needed to sign a receipt!

I also use Apple Pay sometimes but these days I mostly default to contactless payments as the prepaid debit card I use for small purchases is connected to a mobile app on my phone where I can track my spending and get instance push notifications

> That was first time I needed to do that and they also asked for my signature which surprised me as it was first time in my life I needed to sign a receipt!

That's wild. Here in the U.S., I sign a couple of receipts every day.

That is wild! I'm very used to signing receipts as that is the way it is done with a credit card. With debit cards there is a PIN for the debit network, but we're told by the bank to swipe it and sign in (instead of entering a PIN0 order to get the full protection of the Visa network including zero fraud liability even though it comes out the same either way from the consumer's point of view. That usually involves insisting to machine that this is a credit card rather than a debit card.

I only use debit cards (a prepaid Mastercard for small daily purchases and VISA bank debit card for any bigger purchase or to take cash from ATM, plus my business debit card for any expenses while working so it takes money from my business account and not personal) and they always have a chip & PIN. I guess credit cards might work differently as you want to be able to charge back. With debit card there are no charge backs so it makes sense to always use chip & PIN process because it's very secure even though slower.

There is debate about the security of the PIN when the POS has been compromised. So the threat is that your PIN gets stolen and then you have to dispute unauthorized charges against your bank without the protection of Visa or MasterCard's fraud protection.

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