Citibank Debit Card with EMV chip technology

[Anonymous]

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@jsucool76 wrote:
It was just the lack of infrastructure for NFC. The reason NFC has made a comeback with Apple Pay, Google Wallet (Now android pay) and samsung pay, and whoever pay is because on a cell phone there is actually security. You need to use a password or a fingerprint to activate the transfer. With NFC cards, the weakness of RFID skimming was identified pretty quickly, and banks had no way around it so they just started phasing out NFC cards.

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If that were the case they would have been phased out in other countries as well. That's not actually the case, though--in fact, AmEx is offering it on the physical cards again in the US and elsewhere. Most other banks stopped offering them because no one used them. Mainly because tapping was possible almost nowhere. Chicken and egg problem.

Apple Pay has a chance because it got released about the same time that stores had to upgrade for EMV anyway. So instead of buying the absolute cheapest possible terminals without NFC (which they would have done if Apple wasn't in the picture), retailers are shelling out a bit more money for the NFC capable ones instead. Otherwise adopting NFC would have been a much tougher sell; it would also cost Apple a significant amount of money since they'd probably have to pay retailers to upgrade terminals again just a year or two after they upgraded for EMV. Instead, they just needed to ink marketing deals with a representative subset of major retailers and let Apple's track record and mindshare do the rest.

[Anonymous]

Apple Pay worked with any existing terminals.

There was a lot more collaboration with Apple, banks and merchants to make Apple Pay the huge success that it is.

Meanwhile, people are actually still questioning the benefits of EMV chip technology.

The whole argument about EMV being so widely used around the world except for the U.S., .... ok. But guess what, well the U.S. is leading in mobile payments and that's beyond EMV. And Apple Pay is faster than EMV, a technology which ironically is slower than a magnetic swipe.

Personally, I just want the chip cards because they look cool.

In my opinion, this effort of chip cards will never be fully realized.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Apple Pay worked with any existing terminals.

There was a lot more collaboration with Apple, banks and merchants to make Apple Pay the huge success that it is.

Meanwhile, people are actually still questioning the benefits of EMV chip technology.

The whole argument about EMV being so widely used around the world except for the U.S., .... ok. But guess what, well the U.S. is leading in mobile payments and that's beyond EMV. And Apple Pay is faster than EMV, a technology which ironically is slower than a magnetic swipe.

Personally, I just want the chip cards because they look cool.

In my opinion, this effort of chip cards will never be fully realized.

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Yes, but there were a lot fewer of those pre-release. I don't have exact numbers but I think it was something like 5% of retailers or fewer who had tap-capable terminals.

Speaking of EMV, Apple Pay uses a variant of it designed for tap payments. The US also isn't actually the first to do mobile payments either--Japan's been doing it for a long while and banks in Australia and Canada have Android apps that let you tap to pay with their cards. It's just that the latter have much less of a need for it because they've been using EMV and tap-capable cards for quite a while now. Meanwhile, we're the world capital for credit card fraud whose cards were becoming less and less usable outside the country. The status quo wasn't sustainable but I don't know if mobile payments ends up being our ultimate solution; for all we know we could end up just getting used to chip and not bothering with anything else.

[Anonymous]

Tap-capable cards in the U.S. was doomed from the moment it was discovered that the information can simply be scanned using a cheap device. After that, that technology was taken off the market and phased out. 6th months in and almost every bank has Apple Pay. You don't have to wait for a chip, sign, or input a pin with Apple Pay in most cases. Sounds to me like we already have our solution to fraud. People just have to use it.

[Anonymous]

Apparently, Square has just barely started to issue readers for the new cards. This could be a big issue for them.

[Anonymous]

Let me ask this, since the cards have a magnetic stripe anyway, are you protected just by having a chip card or can you still get victim to fraud just because you used the magnetic stripe and never the chip?

[darwin_wins]

Last time I was at the branch and asked about new EMV cards they said they were sending it out to new customers but they have no idea when the existing customers may get it. I found it odd but then again when has anything not been odd with banks.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Tap-capable cards in the U.S. was doomed from the moment it was discovered that the information can simply be scanned using a cheap device. After that, that technology was taken off the market and phased out. 6th months in and almost every bank has Apple Pay. You don't have to wait for a chip, sign, or input a pin with Apple Pay in most cases. Sounds to me like we already have our solution to fraud. People just have to use it.

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That's no different from being able to read EMV cards with a cheap smartcard reader and some free software online. While the very first version of the tap cards did have security issues, just reading the newest ones won't be enough to clone cards. 

As for Apple Pay, that's the big question. Usage is still very low one year out. You still have to sign and/or show the last four digits to the cashier. Even finding a place that takes it is still a problem (mainly because of the problems with the EMV rollout I said above). All of those have contributed to people thinking it's a failure already such that even if a lot of that's fixed quickly, people may not give it or similar technologies a second chance. It's very possible that people will just get used to EMV, not thinking that the technology that they had a hard time using before isn't so hard to use anymore.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Let me ask this, since the cards have a magnetic stripe anyway, are you protected just by having a chip card or can you still get victim to fraud just because you used the magnetic stripe and never the chip?

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We have zero liability either way. Just having the chip makes the retailer that hasn't upgraded yet liable for the fraud though.

[Anonymous]

I trust that the breaches will come! What happens now should be interesting. I wonder who will be the first to go out of business.