While the new chip technology on credit cards and mobile payments has improved security overall, as a business owner you’ve probably noticed it has slowed down your checkout lines. After inserting the card and waiting for the purchase to complete, the customer must then sign the electronic tablet or in some cases a printed receipt handed to them from the cashier. Some stores required their cashiers to check the signature against the back of the card, and ask for another form of ID if the card wasn’t signed. The impact was pretty immediate and resulted in longer checkout lines, frustrating both you and your customers.
MasterCard announced in October of last year that it would make signatures optional on in-store purchases with chip enabled cards starting in this month, and Visa, American Express and Discover quickly followed suit. This comes after many large retail stores, like Wal-Mart, have been pushing for some time to eliminate the need for a signature.
The payments landscape has evolved to the point where we can now eliminate this pain point for our merchants
“The payments landscape has evolved to the point where we can now eliminate this pain point for our merchants,” said Jaromir Divilek, Executive Vice President, Global Network Business, American Express. “Our fraud capabilities have advanced so that signatures are no longer necessary to fight fraud.”
Visa reported that since 2011, they have deployed more than 460 million EMV chip cards and EMV chip-enabled readers at over 2.5 million locations. According to Visa, in less than two years since EMV chip launched in the U.S., fraud declined 66 percent at EMV chip-enabled merchants.
The changes in recent years with credit card payments has made it difficult for many businesses to keep up, not to mention expensive. Speeding transactions up by a few seconds may not seem like a lot, but that time adds up and can make an impact on your bottom line. These changes mean a quicker and more efficient process, for both you AND your customer. Happy customers are repeat customers.
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