Iām currently in the US (Washington DC) and this is how my transactions are breaking down:
-Swipe: 80% (sometimes with signature, often without):
-Chip and signature: 15% (sometimes just chip without signature)
-Chip and pin: 5%
Of the 20% that have chip machines, about half accept Apple Pay or contactless (so 10% of my transactions). Itās still very rare here.
Loads of businesses often use a payment system called Square which offers retailers cheap swipe and signature terminals and chip and signature terminals.
For swipe or chip, often they donāt even require a signature. And sometimes if I forget to sign, theyāll just do a squiggle for me on their terminal. So signatures are not taken seriously at all.
It does very much depend on where in the US (as you say with Washington D.C). Iāve noticed California has a very high rate of chip readers but then historically it always had a lot of issues with fraud. Chains are also much better equipped than smaller stores. If you go to border towns or cities with Canada youāll generally find a high amount of chip readers as well (historically Canadian cards have had chips for a long time (in some cases since 2005), so stolen or cloned cards were used in the US).
Haha. I actually LOVE the emailed receipts (give your email address to one Square retailer and you automatically get receipts every time you pay in a shop that uses Square).
Agreed - Safeway uses chip and pin (one of the few places that does). Trader Jones accepts contactless including Apple Pay.
I would guess California has a lot of chip and pin because itās also the tech centre of the US.
One cafe I go to has Square swipe and Square chip terminals. He routinely just uses swipe but Monzo declined (I needed to turn on magstripe in the app). The guy told me he just reaches for the swipe terminal because so many first iteration US chip cards are unreliable.
That seems to be perpetuated by the Monzo CS but itās wrong. More than likely itās because Square mark the transaction as āfallbackā when a card is swiped (when a chip reader is also installed), so Monzo would have been liable for the fraud (so probably have it set to auto-decline all fallback transactions).
Iām moving to the US in January and Monzo will be my main account while I transition to the US banking system so hopefully it will all work ok.
Out of interest does anybody know of any similar app based banks in the US? I know a lot of people use Venmo for splitting bills when eating out. Maybe an international expansion from Monzo at some pointā¦
Currently in the US and having a massive pain with the NY transit system. Sometimes it just flat declines, and then today I had to choose ācredit cardā and enter a ZIP code (used one I had 10 years ago in the US when I lived here) and went through fine.
I used to have this problem with NYC Subway only if I selected DEBIT as the card type as I didnāt know that itās debit only on home soil and always credit on foreign one. Itās probably not the actual cause but somehow that was the pattern with mine.
Itās because in the USA, debit cards are carried over a different processing network (not Visa or Mastercard), and is intended only for domestic debit cards.
Choosing Credit forces the transaction to be processed over the correct network that can handle international cards.
So only chose Debit in the USA if youāre using a US issued debit card. Use Credit for all internationally issued debit cards and all credit cards.
@Dawid@anon96297711 Indeedā¦In the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and other countries), Debit really means one of the local networks and credit means Visa, MasterCard, Amex etc.
The one exception are that some Canadian debit cards can be run as āDebitā in the US (although with most Canadian debit cards now being co-branded with Visa or MasterCard for usage outside of Canada, itās not really important anymore). Itās only really useful to get around the zip code prompt at US gas stations as you can use the PIN option instead of the zip option (as Canada has British style postal codes).
