Pin and Chip Cards Coming Soon

America is about to make a change. The old way of swiping your credit card and signing your name is dead. Welcome to the pin and chip credit card. Starting in 2015 the new card will  move into the American consumer marketplace.Way too late but welcome just the same. 

With the new pin and chip system the card holder will insert their card into a slot where the machine will read a microchip, not a magnetic stripe. You will sign for the time being, but the new system also enables the use of PIN numbers. Card issuers  will have to decide to add this feature to their cards. 

This is the system that has been in use throughout Europe and the rest of the world for some time now. But America has been left behind in the field of credit card security. The U.S. is the last major market still using the outdated swipe-and-sign card system. That system uses cards with the black magnet strip on the back. This makes American credit cards extremely easy to duplicate once the data has been compromised. The result is that the U.S. accounts for nearly half of all fraudulent credit card charges but only conducts a fourth of all global credit card transactions.

Mastercard and VISA have already begun the implementation of the new pin and chip cards. They have set a deadline of October 2015 to complete the transition for their cardholders.

But Target stores are really pushing the pin and chip technology forward. After suffering one of the most massive data breaches in American history Target is now accelerating the pin and chip point of sale system in its stores. The retailer plans to have the pin and chip card readers in all 1,797 stores by September.

The shift to pin and chip cards was inevitable. Starting in late 2015,  vendors who continue to accept payments from the old magnetic-strip credit cards will be liable for fraudulent purchases. MasterCard’s Carolyn Balfany,who is overseeing the transition to the pin and chip card or EMV (Europay, MasterCard VISA), explains the repercussions to retailers and banks once the new system is in place. 

“If a merchant is still using the old system, they can still run a transaction with a swipe and a signature. But they will be liable for any fraudulent transactions if the customer has a chip card. And the same goes the other way – if the merchant has a new terminal, but the bank hasn’t issued a chip and pin card to the customer, the bank would be liable.”

Belfany went on to say; “The key point of a liability shift is not actually to shift liability around the market. It’s to create co-ordination in the market, so you have issuers and merchants investing in the migration at the same time. This way, we’re not shifting fraud around within the system; we’re driving fraud out of the system.”

Breaking It Down

The change took too damn long! This is something that should have been in place five years ago. But the banks and major American retailers and the credit card providers simply saw credit card fraud as the cost of doing business. Nobody wanted to pay for the new cards  or the point of sales systems. But then Target stores got hammered with a major breach. Then Neiman-Marcus, then eBay, most recently AmericanExpress. The hits just kept coming. Then Congress got interested and the courts started to issue some interesting rulings that began to strip away the precedents many of these companies were hiding behind. Finally they began to sue one another. In 2013 alone there were over 600 credit card system breaches and 70 million cards compromised. The system was on the verge of incineration. To put it mildly; the sh*t hit the fan! And so they had to act. Enter the pin and chip system.

There are a lot black people walking around with credit cards. We purchase as much or more than other people. You’ve heard me say this before, we don’t play when it comes to our money. So we are ready for the new pin and chip cards. I encourage black people to call their banks and anybody else they have a credit card from and ask for that new pin and chip card ASAP! Its imperative you protect yourself because the crooks know the new system is coming and they want to rob as many people as possible before it becomes more difficult.

But there is more to this article to be examined. For example; why is it the option of the company issuing the cards to decide if they will accept PIN numbers with the new pin and chip card? Now in my opinion if they are really interested in protecting you then this would be a no brainer. But they are not so they may not require you to use a PIN. Why? Because the idea is to get you to spend money and eliminate any unnecessary steps between you and your money. Not to mention the cost of setting up systems for that extra layer of security. They are trying to avoid the extra expense.  So you have to demand it for your cards. I want black people all  across America to take the extra few second to use a PIN with that new credit card. Demand that your bank or retailer allow you to implement the PIN. Don’t wait for some really smart hacker to figure how to beat this system and believe me they will eventually. Demand the most stringent security you can get to protect your money. Cause black people don’t play when it comes to our money.