Monday, January 10, 2005
Chip & PIN - a missed opportunity?
OK, so chip & PIN is here, like it or not. Most places now have the equipment in place to accept new style cards, and despite some concerns over the shift of responsibility on to the consumer to protect their card details, my feeling is that this change is proceeding relatively smoothly. All my cards now have chips, and I use my PIN whenever I can. Some retailers are still a little unfamiliar with their new equipment, but obviously that will change over time. My main observation of the different bits of kit used to allow people to enter their PIN is that it is just that: different. In some stores they swipe your card at the till, and you enter your pin using a separate keypad. In other places, they use an integrated reader/keypad, which is then handed to you to enter your PIN. Sometimes you hand it back and they remove your card, sometimes they expect you to do it yourself. I got exasperated looks last week when the cashier at a petrol station had to tell me twice that I first had to check the amount and press OK and then enter my PIN - of course I wasn't listening because I was just trying to enter my PIN, and to date this is the only place that has asked me to do this. All of these minor variations in how to use a chip & PIN card lead to some fiddly frustrations trying to negotiate with people behind glass screens, and not knowing exactly what to do with a keypad is not going to help with people's wariness of the new system. I think they've missed an opportunity to streamline the payment process as well as making it more secure - all the equipment should work in the same way, making it easier for people to know what to do. I can only hope that as the equipment becomes more familiar, there will be a drift towards conventions of use. It's just as much to do with how we physically use these keypads, passing them between us and the retailer, as it is to do with the actual technology behind chip & PIN.
OK, so chip & PIN is here, like it or not. Most places now have the equipment in place to accept new style cards, and despite some concerns over the shift of responsibility on to the consumer to protect their card details, my feeling is that this change is proceeding relatively smoothly. All my cards now have chips, and I use my PIN whenever I can. Some retailers are still a little unfamiliar with their new equipment, but obviously that will change over time. My main observation of the different bits of kit used to allow people to enter their PIN is that it is just that: different. In some stores they swipe your card at the till, and you enter your pin using a separate keypad. In other places, they use an integrated reader/keypad, which is then handed to you to enter your PIN. Sometimes you hand it back and they remove your card, sometimes they expect you to do it yourself. I got exasperated looks last week when the cashier at a petrol station had to tell me twice that I first had to check the amount and press OK and then enter my PIN - of course I wasn't listening because I was just trying to enter my PIN, and to date this is the only place that has asked me to do this. All of these minor variations in how to use a chip & PIN card lead to some fiddly frustrations trying to negotiate with people behind glass screens, and not knowing exactly what to do with a keypad is not going to help with people's wariness of the new system. I think they've missed an opportunity to streamline the payment process as well as making it more secure - all the equipment should work in the same way, making it easier for people to know what to do. I can only hope that as the equipment becomes more familiar, there will be a drift towards conventions of use. It's just as much to do with how we physically use these keypads, passing them between us and the retailer, as it is to do with the actual technology behind chip & PIN.
Comments:
I'm very much with you. I find that I sometimes make some decisions for my customers because they are incapable of using the contraption correctly. They just want to type the number in and get it over with. They don't want to know about price confirmation. I've just told them the price so why do they need to care? They'll get a receipt afterwards to prove it.
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(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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