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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

I'd love:

- Universal, near-instantaneous per transaction alerts. It helps stop fraud right away rather than after-the-fact. It also helps solve problems while they are fresh rather than trying to resolve a month-old+ issue. Some countries overseas do this almost universally.

- On-restaurant-table credit card swipe rather than taking the card away and entering tip later. Many places overseas do this almost universally.

-- Side note on the txn alerts: I suppose it is due to the way Visa/MasterCard are processed, but I sometimes get alerts a day or more after i've done a credit card transaction. Some cards dont even have the option for alerts.

AMEX has great alters, almost instantaneous, but I suppose they control the entire stack, so that makes sense.

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> On-restaurant-table credit card swipe rather than taking the card away and entering tip later. Many places overseas do this almost universally.

If they took the card away, how would you enter the card's PIN? That's why places outside the USA do the swipe on the table.

In the US, almost universally, they take the card away. Swipe it somewhere in the back -- without a PIN. Then bring back a receipt for an inked signature, which is supposed to the be the alternative to a PIN.

Oh, and you put the tip in on that receipt, and they go back and do a second entry of the tip (sometimes incorrectly, almost always higher when incorrect.)

Worse - the transaction alert -- if you get one -- is the pre-tip amount. Makes no sense.

FYI if they enter the final amount incorrectly you can dispute the charge with your credit card provider. It's probably a stronger case if you kept your own copy with the final amount that you wrote down.

> - On-restaurant-table credit card swipe rather than taking the card away and entering tip later. Many places overseas do this almost universally.

This isn't a problem you can solve by changing the banking industry. This is a point-of-sale problem.

> This isn't a problem you can solve by changing the banking industry. This is a point-of-sale problem.

It's all part of a larger set of "problems with US financial services". The fact that it is technically different vendors is not relevant...

It is if you want to solve the problem across the board, rather than having a niche system that a small handful of vendors use that just introduces one more surprising variation at payment time.

I disagree entirely. The problem is that the US banking industry permits this state of affairs. They should require updated, at-table point-of-sale devices within a reasonable timeframe to be able to continue to take credit cards.

Migration has a cost. Many small vendors have razor-thin margins.

Then have the banks fund it out of the savings from reduced stolen card fraud.

It always seemed odd to me that the card readers are owned by the retailer. On the one hand, that leads to a lot of old or insecure-by-design equipment in circulation as 'not worth the cost to replace", and on the other hand, it tends to lead to a lot of annoying spam calls of "we'll replace your machine if you switch your payment processing to our company."

If the upstream providers provded the readers as a leased service instead-- maybe for a few dollars a month-- they could push out insecure gear in a timely manner more aggressively. Just reject connections from old devices because everyone renting the old model has been sent a new one already. It would also eliminate the price of equipment upgrades as a leverage for competitors to peel off customers.

From what I can tell, the machines are fairly locked to the service providers, and require fairly intensive setup, so it's not necessarily like an unlocked phone where you'd save money by buying a device independently of the service.

Not that I have practical experience with this, but I believe that equipment leasing is the norm in Australia.

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