Back in August, signing for credit cards was phased out in favour of making people use a PIN instead. While there was an adjustment period to allow smaller businesses to update their terminals if needed, from Monday (20 October) signing for your credit card will be all but dead in Australia.
Credit card picture from Shutterstock
The only exceptions will be overseas cards that don’t have a PIN associated with them, or customers who are unable to easily type or memorise numbers (for whom special arrangements can be made by their bank). For everyone else, it’s PIN time — so if you’ve missed all the previous warnings, get onto your bank quickly to arrange one.
The one context where you won’t need a PIN either is if you use a payWave or PayPass card for a sub-$100 transaction. Those should go through automatically.
Comments
4 responses to “Credit Card PIN Reminder: No More Signing From Monday”
What happens if they haven’t updated their terminal? I added a pin to my card months ago and 90% of the time I’m still required to sign.
WHAT!? You choose to enter a pin or sign not them
Reportedly, the transaction will be refused. I guess we’ll see next week.
You should never be *forced* to sign (unless you have a foreign card or something). Even if the terminal has not been updated you should be prompted to enter a PIN at the least (you can potentially bypass it by just pressing enter with no PIN entered).
Article doesn’t mention that you don’t need to enter a PIN for some low value inserted transactions either.
You may also be prompted for signature (in addition to PIN) if the transaction is approved offline under some conditions (bad connection to the bank/host), or when doing refunds.
There will of course also be terminals that still haven’t been updated; but they should start disappearing.
My Amex card does not have a chip on it yet, and will apparently be usable still.
From their site (copied today):
Magnetic stripe Cards will NOT be impacted by the 1 August change, and you can continue to sign for your in-store purchases. You will receive a chip enabled Card by March 2015 and will be required to select a PIN during activation.
So it’s not just overseas cards that are exempt from the requirement.
AMEX issues are aplenty…
Was a Birkenhead Point (Sydney) few weekends ago (after 1/8). In two shops (Oakley and Lees) their EFTPOS machine “wasn’t working” for AMEX PINs. So the cashier told me to sign even though my AMEX has a chip.
In another store (Oroton) my wife paid with an AMEX without a chip and the cashier had to ask her manager if signing is still allowed..
Earlier before that on 2/8 at Costco Auburn we got into an argument that AMEX cards without chips had to be pinned… and cannot be signed.. Had to show them the statement from the AMEX website.