Do merchants or retailers need different equipment to accept chip cards?
Chip cards are a more secure way of conducting card payments and allow the card issuers the opportunity to provide a variety of products and services to their customers through the embedded chip. Their capacity to store securely a PIN value and for this to be checked at the point of sale is one way in which we can increase the security of payments. The vast majority of UK point-of-sale devices have been upgraded to read chip cards, and PIN entry devices added to them to allow customers to enter their PINs. The experience in the UK is that customers have had no problems moving from signature based verification to PIN and in most cases the move has resulted in an improvement in the customer experience. As far as overseas transactions are concerned, cards retain the magnetic stripe on the reverse and this allows them to be used in markets that have not implemented chip card technology. In such markets signature verification will be allowed.
