Credit Card Signature Depature

Podcast (audio) Show Notes:

Credit Cards Signature Departure:

As of April 13th, American Express, MasterCard, Visa, and Discover set in motion the demise of the signature.
Why does that matter?
- Most stopped requiring signatures for smaller purchases back as early as 2010.
- It is still up to the merchants if they want to require a signature on purchases moving forward: Walmart and Target will start phasing them out later this month in April while some like Square will still require signatures for the time being.
- They all aren’t necessarily using the same strategy to phase them out as well: American Express is eliminating this around the world. Visa is optional in North America only for merchants that have upgraded to chip systems. MasterCard have waved goodbye to North America and Canada, which, really is still a part of North America. 🙂 Then there is Discover who won’t need signature in North America, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. Makes sense for the major impact in North America seeing that we are the world’s slowest at adopting better, more secure systems such as Chip and Pin, Samsung Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.
What are better, more secure options? Will chip and pin really be dominate and aren’t signatures more secure?
- Chip and pin has been around since the EMV what we more so know today was written in 1993 and 1994.
- North America has been the slowest in a fast paced, 1st world to really adopt this technology.
- Samsung Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay are the better options for the near future.
  - Even our White House Cyber Security Summit has signed off on Apple Pay along with it’s confidence on the platform being highly secure.
  - All of these systems mentioned support NFC (or near field communication) and you must authenticate with your fingerprint such as Touch ID, or even Face ID on the newer Apple iPhone X.
  - Sticking to Apple Pay due to Apple’s security standards, they do not save your transactions on their servers. You can see the most recent transactions under wallet though for reference.
  - Specifically, this system is token based. The way that it works is the payments are secured by a created token that replaces your actual credit card number(s). The DAN, or Device Account Number, is assigned, encrypted, and stored in a secure enclave (which is it’s own dedicated chip) and that token is passed from the device to the retailer. The retailer NEVER has access to your card details, which is why some merchants actually don’t support Apple Pay and the others. Walmart, for example, pushes Current C, which is provided by MCX which JP Morgan Chase purchased back in 2017 which is QR Code based and offered an alternative.