Don’t sign right here: Credit cards eliminate the need for signatures
The issuer of your credit card still wants you to sign the back of it, but it’s less necessary now than it’s ever been. Welcome to the fully-digital world.
If your Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover cards are chip-enabled (which is pretty much a gimme in 2018), you’re no longer required to sign the receipt at a register, or for a restaurant or bar purchase.
The “no signatures” directive took effect April 1.
Chip cards were introduced in 2015, all but replacing the magnetic stripe as identification carriers. The information encrypted in the chip, unlike that in the stripe, is unique to each transaction and has increased personal security exponentially. In the last two years, Visa reports, the frequency of counterfeit card fraud (via merchant purchases) has declined 66 percent.
The signature, once a necessary backup, is now all but superfluous.
“The payments landscape has evolved to the point where we can now eliminate this pain point for our merchants,” said AmEx Global Network Business Vice President Jaromir Divilek in a recent press release. “Our fraud capabilities have advanced so that signatures are no longer necessary to fight fraud.”
Convenience and expediency are, of course, taken for granted by today’s consumers, the majority of which grew up without making credit card purchases via the old slide-across imprinting machines, a laborious process which included signatures and carbon-paper copies. Chip-enabled debit cards are the currency of contemporary America.
According to a recent study by the global payment provider TSYS, debit cards were preferred by 44 percent of of 1,200 customers surveyed. Thirty-three percent of these preferred credit cards, with just 12 percent preferring to pay cash.
