Dip or Swipe? A Year Later, Most Consumers Still Have POS Confusion About EMV

By Kevin Woodward
@DTPaymentNews

A year into the migration to EMV chip cards, most consumers—83%—still are unsure of whether to dip or swipe their chip-enabled credit or debit cards at the point of sale.

That statistic comes from a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers commissioned by payments specialist Cayan and conducted by Research Now Group Inc. The survey found widespread consumer uncertainty about whether merchants accept chip cards or not. Some merchants not yet enabled for EMV place a placard on their point-of-sale terminals indicating chip cards are not yet accepted, but many don’t.

Of the estimated 8 million merchants that accept cards, as many as 2 million, actively accept the EMV cards, according to MasterCard Inc. data. Of these, 1.3 million are small and mid-size businesses, the card brand says.

In an effort to know whether to dip or swipe, 44% of consumers look for a sign on the POS device. Forty percent of the time, the cashier will instruct them.

Confusion over whether to dip or swipe could cause delays at the checkout, especially as the busy fourth-quarter shopping season gets under way. “Consumers default to the behavior that’s most comfortable,” says Marc Castrechini, Cayan vice president of product management. “In most cases, that’s a swipe.”

Industry efforts to improve the chip-card payment experience, such as offering revised EMV protocols that enable consumers to remove a card from the reader before the transaction is complete, may actually add to the confusion, Castrechini says. “Now we’re actually adding a second layer of complexity,” he says, alluding to consumers being potentially unsure if they can remove their cards early.

Consumers perceive chip card transactions as taking longer—17 seconds—than non-chip transactions, 11 seconds, the survey says.

Castrechini says chip card transactions made using Cayan’s Genius payments platform take about 4 seconds. That is the result of Cayan’s developers having fine-tuned the EMV specification by tweaking such settings as menu prompting, he says.

The Cayan survey also discovered that about 42% of consumers use their chip cards three or more times per week, but most consumers—91% in the past six months—encountered POS terminals that didn’t accept chip cards.

These are early days for EMV in the United States, Castrechini says, with an ongoing evolution of the technology. “We are not near the finish line,” he says. “It may be years because [the payments industry] is continuing to explore things in new ways.”