CHICAGO -- Visa, American Express, Discover and Mastercard have each announced that they will make signatures optional for most credit-card transactions.
Visa was the last to announce it will phase out the signature requirement for cards with EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) chip cards starting in April 2018, according to the San Francisco Bay Area news blog Silicon Beat. However, older credit cards without a chip will still require authentication signatures.
Mastercard was the first to announce a signature phase-out in October 2017, followed by American Express and Discover in December.
“Visa is committed to delivering secure, fast and convenient payments at the point of sale,” said Dean Sanford, Visa’s vice president of consumer products, to Silicon Beat. “Our focus is on continually evolving the market toward dynamic authentication methods such as EMV chip, as well as investing in emerging capabilities that leverage advanced analytics and biometrics.”
Most other countries that use EMV technology have already stopped using signatures, according to Fortune.
For fuel retailers, the fuel island EMV acceptance shift has been extended to Oct. 1, 2020. Once that shift takes place, merchants that have not transitioned to EMV chip technology will have liability for fraud, counterfeit or stolen cards used in their point-of-sale.
According to Visa, merchants who have adopted EMV reported a 66% decline in fraud in the first two years of EMV deployment.
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