I assume that the Chip-and-pin system isnt standard in the US like it is in the UK. Can a similar technology be applied to chips?
You would need some cooperation from the card issuer to clone the card, or some sophisticated technical equipment to open up the chip and read it.
In the EMV process the private key should be unique to the card (if you make a replacement card with the same number, it's a different key); the private key shouldn't exist anywhere outside the chip after the card is made; and there aren't supposed to be any ways to read the key. Well, cutting the chip and scanning with a electron microscope works, but it's impractical.
I'm not saying that there aren't any bugs in the implementation, but I'm quite sure that there are no known bugs that allow simply to get the key; even full control of the HSM which holds the bank's private key should allow you only to make/sign new fake cards, but not recreate an existing card.
Q. Does Coin support chip and pin (EMV)?
A. Coin is currently designed for the U.S. market and does not support chip and pin (EMV), however, future generations of the device will include EMV.
Heck, they're running a kickstarter for funding, while even dreaming about being a card issuer would require to start with posting multimillion security deposits.
Unfortunately cross-bank and cross-scheme cooperation has never been there to the extent that this has been possible so far.
I see it on every terminal I use here in France, so it seems to somewhat work already here.
I've been out of the payments game a few years now (going back in on Monday though) but in EMV speak an 'application' is usually something like Visa, or Mastercard or something along those lines. Some cards I looked at in the past had a few on them for local schemes, for instance we had "Switch" cards here in the UK that were the equivalent of "Maestro" in Europe, but were different enough that a lot of UK debit cards had both applications on them.
If "pay in three installments" is a sort-of credit facility provided by your card issuer(?) then I suppose it could be coded as an on-card application. In fact if you wanted to give your customers that choice on every single transaction I can't think of a better way.
Would get damn annoying...