As credit card tech evolved, some would-be hiccups never happened – Boston Herald/crypto news

By Fanto Omojola, Nerdwallet

It may not seem “futuristic” these days to dive or touch a credit card instead of sliding it, or keeping a cell phone on a payment terminal to cover its grocers.

But in the United States, you just have to return about 10 years or so, before EMV chips and TECHNOLOGY WITHOUT CONTACT It became a standard in credit cards: finding a different world, where those characteristics now common would have been perceived as unusual, confusing and potentially insecure.

Much has changed in credit card technology since 2015, although the average card holder has proven to be a fast study.

“American consumers have adapted significantly well to these innovations,” said Seth Perlman, head of the Global Product of I2C Inc., a global provider of banking and payment solutions. He added, however, that “the process has not been exempt from challenges.”

Leaving the learning curves aside, many obstacles that were expected widely never materialized for card holders and, with the benefit of retrospective, now they seem a bit silly.

Mugar wasn’t so hard

A remarkable advance of the card in the United States during the last decade was the proliferation of cards enabled for EMV. Those initials represent Europe and Mastercard and Visa, the companies that developed technology. Introduced as a way to mitigate credit card fraud, EMV chips card to use the old method of sliding a card that data stored in a magnetic strip on the back.

EMV chips had already been in wide use in other parts of the world; Europe, for example, already knew technology. But Emv really did not begin to luck in the US. Uu until 2015. And a big question was: “Will the card holders know what to do now in the registry?” Starting by hand. Flow diagrams were created.

But it turns out that we immerse ourselves calmly. From 2022, 69% of all cards issued were enabled for EMV, and 93% of all global physical card transactions used EMV chip technology, according to EMVCO data, which manages EMV technology.

“As merchants updated their point of sale systems and card issuers refined technology, consumers quickly He got used to it To the greatest security and tranquility that EMV provides, ”said Perlman.

NERD POINT The adoption of EMV technology was also promoted by a “change of responsibility”, which meant that with the advent of technology, card issuers were no longer the only ones responsible for card fraud. Rather, the responsibility for fraudulent transactions became the responsibility of the party that did not support EMV, which means, in many cases, the merchant. Therefore, companies were motivated to implement this change and replace their point of sale systems to protect themselves.

Go ‘without chip and pin’ became painless, especially

During those first years of use of EMV in the US, a common chorus was that Americans probably needed to carry a card with “chip and pin” capabilities when they were traveling abroad. That was due to a difference in how card holders verified their identity at the point of sale.