It baffles me that the US is still struggling to get chip-and-pin working properly, when most of Europe has been using chip-and-pin for over a decade and is now transitioning to contactless. America seems weirdly bad at this sort of co-ordination problem.
Because the U.S. does not have chip-and-pin, we have chip-and-sign. The main reason is that federal law in the U.S. limits the credit-card holder fraud liability to $50, and does so with language around signatures. Those same laws also set out fraud penalties for people fraudulently signing.
Since all of the laws revolve around signing, we don't get PINs.
There is a second wrinkle to this for Europe: because there is no equivalent to these laws, in many cases Europeans are the ones completely on the hook for fraudulent transactions as the correct PIN number is seen as evidence the consumer having leaked it. So in cases of fraud the U.S. chip-and-signiture winds up protecting the consumer much more.
AFAIK ALMOST NO US-based banks issue chip+pin credit cards. Only chip+signature. Debit cards are indeed chip+pin, but in USA you'd have to be careless to ever use a debit card anywhere but an ATM.
This. I'd NEVER give thieves access to my bank account, that's what credit cards are for. Chip transactions take ~5 seconds, it just feels slow because with a swipe you can put the card away in your wallet while the processing is happening.
Chip+PIN doesn't really exist for US CCs. I've setup PINs on a few cards but they only work overseas where the terminal refuses signature.
