In April, all major credit card firms will no longer require a signature for purchases made with chip cards
In April, all major credit card companies will no longer ask for signatures for transactions made with chip cards, Fox News reports. The change has been coming slowly since cards with security chips first appeared in the United States two years ago.
Experts have touted chip cards as more secure than magnetic strip cards, since the technology makes counterfeiting the cards extremely difficult. Signature authentication, which has been around for years, hasn’t added to card security. “We assign a value to the signature. We think there are some sort of legitimacy to signing a receipt. The reality is it’s just not a robust form of security,” pointed out Bankrate.com analyst Robert Barba.
Cybersecurity expert Alan Brill, Kroll senior managing director, added that financial firms already have security systems to prevent fraud, so having signature authentication is unnecessary. Card companies make “risk decisions a million times an hour,” he said, while their “systems dynamically do a good job” at reducing fraud.
Customers already prefer debit cards to credit cards, according to a recent study. Debit cards typically have personal identification numbers (PINS) associated with them, rather than signatures. National Retail Federation spokesman Craig Shearman said that “a chip and a PIN provides a full amount of security.”
