At least they used to be. Chips ruined that. Now I have to stand there staring at the screen for half a minute waiting to respond to prompts and to pull the card out at the end. For most transactions, cash is probably faster than using a chip.
When I was visiting Sweden the terminals did not support NFC or I was just doing something wrong.
Though I’m in the US. I hear chip transactions are way faster in other countries where they’ve been using that system for a while.
Everyone hates the chip.
At least in Spain
In the US it's chip and signature, and you can't sign until after the chip verification (either signing a paper receipt, or with a stylus on the terminal screen).
In addition chips are new and some terminals are painfully slow (30 seconds) to verify. I'm not sure I've ever seen one finish in under 5 seconds, though a few merchants have terminals that come close to that.
We now have contactless payments for under £30 in the UK, similar to Apple pay but you just place your card on the reader.
When you use a PIN you get a nice two factor signature from the card chip: it signs the current timestamp and the PIN you knew, and can do both as quickly as chip's processing capability and the bandwidth between the chip and terminal allows.
US banks came up with a dumb compromise just like most of their websites use Wish-It-Were-Two-Factor auth and secondary "Security Question" passwords, the chip cards in the US are doing their own Wish-It-Were-Two-Factor: sign a timestamp, wait some amount of wall clock time, sign a different timestamp.
Most of the wait in a chip purchase in the US is artificial just to make sure that two timestamps are "sufficiently" different. US banks should just give people PINs and stop this silliness.
Is this conjecture, or do you have actual citations to back this up? Those same banks have been issuing debit cards with PINs for a couple decades.
Every chip card I've received to date from several different major US banks has included some variation of "Great news! You don't need to learn or use a PIN to use this card."
My personal reaction every time has been, "But what if I want to use a PIN?" and this far I've never seen a satisfactory answer in those same letters or on those banks' own websites.
Admittedly that is purely anecdotal, as far as citations go, but in my mind it seems pretty clear what these banks think about PINs for credit cards.