As an American who has lived and banked in the Netherlands in the past, I couldn't agree more.
I loved the free transfers and how easy it was to send someone money. The efficiency of Dutch banking left me in awe. I remember specifically a banker telling me while I was opening an account: "Oh, and we don't use checks here. We like it that way"
"Random readers" are pretty awesome as well. I kept mine after I moved away.
I'm in the UK, currently I have one cheque based transaction a year (paying for the maintenance of our shared gardens) and one cash transaction a month (getting my hair cut).
It feels very odd going to the US where you have to sign with a pen when paying by card (rather than chip-n-pin).
It feels very odd going to the US where you have to sign with a pen when paying by card (rather than chip-n-pin).
The fun part is that that signature doesn't seem to do anything. It used to be that occasionally the cashier would check it against the signature on the back of the card (years ago), but now they never do that. They seem to have stopped asking to see my ID in the last few months as well... so now I can just swipe my card (or presumably someone else's card that I "found") and draw a smiley face on the signature pad, and that's it.
Recently, an engineer I work with (I work for Simple) asked if we could add an image of the signature to transaction metadata in our web and mobile applications. I thought it was a neat idea, so I started asking around, but was dismayed when I found out that the whereabouts of electronic signatures was completely unclear.
Can any network or point-of-sales people tell me if the signature is being transmitted? Stored? Analyzed?
The signed reciepts are stored; and in case of a chargeback or transaction dispute the merchant has to provide them. Only then they are analyzed, but in practice it doesn't matter, any scrawl is considered as good as another.
The only case where I have seen signature analysis being actually useful was a case where the customer was attempting to defraud the bank/merchant - claimed a stolen card but actually bought the stuff himself. But that is very rare compared to real stolen or skimmed cards, where signatures are pretty much useless in fraud prevention or shifting liability to someone else.
And I feel the pain of this system when I travel to the UK. I live in Belfast 1/3 of the year and there isn't a single American bank that will issue me a chip-n-pin card. I haven't investigated how hard it would be to set up a UK credit card. Large stores usually accept American cards but I've had many smaller shops tell me they can't do a swipe anymore.
My experience visiting the UK from the USA was that everywhere would accept a swipe transaction, but that the staff didn't necessarily know how to do it (many were too young to have ever had direct experience of swiping a credit card).
The two things that helped were 1) being patient, and 2) carrying a pen.
The thing that didn't help was having a British accent and an American credit card...
I've noticed a chain of grocery stores in my area installed new card readers recently which appear to have a slot above the LCD screen. What I haven't figured out yet is whether or not that slot is aesthetic or a chip-and-PIN reader.
I have a Wells Fargo credit card that has a chip in it, I just haven't bothered to try yet.
This is the standard way of operation in Germany, too. Like many other things in the U.S., we're about 30 years behind Europe. (That would explain why I'm wearing leg warmers today, too. ;)
They do two-factor authentication: you put in a passphrase and/or a debit card and it generates a token that you enter on your bank's website before you can make a transaction. The purpose is to make it impossible for somebody who has installed a keylogger on your computer to transfer money from your account by using your password. Other banks use your mobile phone: they send an SMS with a token to your phone, which you enter on their website.
A problem with them is that somebody can install a program on your computer that intercepts the code you enter, and then makes a different transaction than the one you intended to make. In this sense SMS based tokens are safer, because the banks send the amount of money and the recipient in the SMS along with the code. If a program was installed that changed the recipient and/or the amount, you'd be able to detect this in the SMS because then the SMS would display the wrong recipient and/or amount. On the other hand, your smartphone can nowadays be infected too, which those key generators cannot be...
Ah, right. In the UK they have the ones that read the credit card, in Greece we have simple number generators. Every bank uses them, though (I didn't know what they were called, we call them "tokens").
I loved the free transfers and how easy it was to send someone money. The efficiency of Dutch banking left me in awe. I remember specifically a banker telling me while I was opening an account: "Oh, and we don't use checks here. We like it that way"
"Random readers" are pretty awesome as well. I kept mine after I moved away.
America needs to catch up.