As many of you know, I have
been in card payments for almost 35 years. My last position in the US was
managing the acceptance and issuance adoption of EMV chip cards--not a small
task. Once we got adoption well underway, I would hear from friends and
others about their chip experiences and it was always the same things: "It's slow"
and "Why is it taking
so long to adopt chip?” I would tell them why it was, but
now living in Singapore I still think about those questions.
It has become a habit over the last two or so years, to count in my head how long a chip transaction takes. In Singapore (which has had chip for over 10 years), it typically takes 12-17 seconds. McDonalds has the fastest at about 6-7 seconds. Singapore has addressed that speed issue (as have Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, and the UK) with contactless Pay Wave chip transactions using dual-interface cards or mobile "Pays" like Android Pay, Apple Pay, or Samsung Pay.
And while the US is not there on contactless, the US did announce Quick Chip over a year ago which initially had transactions in the 2-3 second range and now one terminal vendor has transactions down to 1 second! We will see what happens with contactless in the US.
So why did it take so long in the US? US merchants typically have terminals that face the cardholder and are tightly integrated into their cash register systems. Think about how rarely you actually hand your card over to the sales associate in the US--almost never. And these systems are expensive and time consuming to change. Contrast that with most of the rest of the world that has stand-alone or semi-integrated terminals that are easy to update the software.
When Julie and Christopher were here a couple of weeks ago, we went to a Harvey Norman (think of Best Buy). The sales associate would take your card to make the transaction and look at the number of terminals they had to make transactions -- 10!
So the bottom line is that the US is different than the rest of the world, but boy are they catching up!
It has become a habit over the last two or so years, to count in my head how long a chip transaction takes. In Singapore (which has had chip for over 10 years), it typically takes 12-17 seconds. McDonalds has the fastest at about 6-7 seconds. Singapore has addressed that speed issue (as have Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, and the UK) with contactless Pay Wave chip transactions using dual-interface cards or mobile "Pays" like Android Pay, Apple Pay, or Samsung Pay.
 |
| Terminals at Harvey Norman |
And while the US is not there on contactless, the US did announce Quick Chip over a year ago which initially had transactions in the 2-3 second range and now one terminal vendor has transactions down to 1 second! We will see what happens with contactless in the US.
So why did it take so long in the US? US merchants typically have terminals that face the cardholder and are tightly integrated into their cash register systems. Think about how rarely you actually hand your card over to the sales associate in the US--almost never. And these systems are expensive and time consuming to change. Contrast that with most of the rest of the world that has stand-alone or semi-integrated terminals that are easy to update the software.
When Julie and Christopher were here a couple of weeks ago, we went to a Harvey Norman (think of Best Buy). The sales associate would take your card to make the transaction and look at the number of terminals they had to make transactions -- 10!
So the bottom line is that the US is different than the rest of the world, but boy are they catching up!
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