Visa Wants to Make your Chip Credit Card Purchase Faster
- By Sydny Shepard
- Apr 20, 2016
By now, everyone in the United States has come into contact with the EMV chip-enabled cards. You’ve pushed your card into a machine and nervously waited to hear the blaring honks that indicate that you can, finally, remove your card and go on with your life.
Since the chip-enabled cards came onto the consumer scene, people have noticed (and complained about) the amount of time it takes to complete a purchase using the new cards. In all, it takes up to 20 seconds to complete a chip-enabled credit card purchase. Visa is hoping to trim 18 seconds off that time.
“Overall, there was some merchant dissatisfaction with how long it was taking to process the transaction,” Ellen Richey, Visa’s vice chairman of risk and public policy, told the Wall Street Journal in an interview.
Visa said on Tuesday that it had upgraded its software to improve the processing of chip-enabled cards and reduce checkout times. The software update would allow customers to dip their credit card in for two seconds, rather than having to leave it in the payment machine for an elongated amount of time while the transaction is going through.
While the card companies have tried to do their part to cut down on transaction times, retailers are coming up with ways to save time, too. Walmart, for instance, has removed the prompt that asks the customer to approve the cost of purchase. This, in total, saves about 11 seconds per transaction.
Our world of instantaneous gratification is being seemingly held up by these new chip-enabled cards and businesses, banks and retailers are doing everything they can to ensure that your in-store purchase experience is as smooth as the one-click Amazon.com purchase you make at 3 a.m. without realizing it. It just may take some time to get it perfect, and time is exactly what everyone is so frustrated about to begin with.
About the Author
Sydny Shepard is the Executive Editor of Campus Security & Life Safety.