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American Express Co. made available Wednesday the AmEx Quick Chip program that enables a seemingly speedier EMV chip card transaction.
Similar to what MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. recently announced, the AmEx program enables consumers to remove their AmEx chip cards from readers once the card has been verified instead of waiting until the transaction is complete. No changes happen to the authorization step, which allows cashiers to continue to ring up purchases with the card removed, Mike Matan, senior vice president of AmEx’s Global Network Business, tells Digital Transactions News.
Many consumers are used to swiping a magnetic-stripe card through a reader and immediately putting it away. The service, which merchants can get from point-of-sale service providers such as their acquirers or independent sales organizations, aims to shorten the perceived time it takes to complete an EMV transaction. The expectation is merchants and consumers will have a better checkout experience.
AmEx Quick Chip requires a software update to the merchant’s POS terminal. It is free to merchants.
Matan says the AmEx Quick Chip program is U.S.-only for now, and hasn’t been necessary in other markets, many of which have had EMV availability much longer than the United States. The U.S. EMV migration began in earnest Oct. 1 when the card networks’ liability shifts for counterfeit cards kicked in.
Matan would not say how many AmEx cards do not have chips, just that most of them do. “The majority were chip-enabled by the end of last year,” he says. AmEx had 57.6 million cards in force in the U.S. as of Dec. 31, according to its fourth-quarter financial report.
He also declined to provide the number of chip-accepting AmEx merchants. MasterCard says 1.4 million merchants accept its EMV chip cards and Visa says 1 million merchants accept its chip cards. Matan says that merchant adoption of chip cards, however, is across the board from AmEx’s perspective. No one group of merchants is accepting chip cards more than others.
