Strong Customer Authentication: Using Chip and PIN more often when making contactless payments

[erincandescent (Erin)]

@nfoote

Reading through these previous messages am I right in thinking that on mainland Europe the terminal machine simply asks for the PIN in addition to the contactless touch whereas UK terminals are expressly barred from doing this so have no option but to decline the entire transaction and restart the payment process?
If this is the case how did the major UK banks not howl that this would be a terrible experience and something needed to be re-thought?

The expected behaviour of terminals - and what has been my (fortunate, I guess) experience is:

• You tap your card
• “Authorizing” happens as normal
• We respond saying “User is over their limit, please perform strong authentication”
• The terminal prompts something along the lines of “Please insert your card PIN required”
• You insert your card, enter your PIN, and it authorizes as normal

All of this purely at the terminal/pin-pad - no interaction with the POS system should be required at all

Unfortunately a number of terminals or POS systems appear to be misconfigured and treat the “Please perform strong authentication” response as a hard decline. Even more unfortunately a small number of them seem to get “stuck” until you abort the transaction and retry

When it does work properly (as has been my experience at e.g. Tesco’s card only self service terminals) the experience is pretty fluid (except that a bunch of places have programmed their terminals with somewhat jargony phrases like “Please insert card SCA REQUIRED”)