Visa is the first card company to publicly state that they are spending the money necessary to upgrade their software to process chip embedded cards faster. Currently all the card companies are getting a lot of grumbling from customers and from businesses who have peak times about the sheer length of time it takes to finalize a transaction, even a tap and go one. The company has labeled this new software Quick Chip for EMV, they has said the software will allow a transaction to be completed in under 2 seconds. As of May 31 2017, there are approximately 40,175 U.S. merchant locations reported as supporting Quick Chip. Merchant locations doubled in Quick Chip acceptance in February 2017.
Cards that take 10 to 15 seconds to process have been a particular annoyance for businesses, like coffee shops, who at their peak times can be trying to process up to 350 transactions per hour, some retailers of even said that the queue to pay for what you want to buy is longer than the queue to collect it, which is unacceptable to them and their customers but until now the only other choice was to pay cash which in a lot of cases has been the faster option, that is not something any of the card companies wanted to hear.
Amongst retailers who have been the victims of very slow processing of purchases there has even been talk of a lawsuit against the credit card companies, the allegation of course is that the slow processing of payments has been costing these organizations business revenue. Some businesses have even stopped taking cards because they are just too slow, too expensive and just plain annoying for the business owners, these businesses are easy to see because they usually place something on top of the card machine to prevent customers from accessing it.
A couple of the card retailers have even been dragging the chain according to the big-box retailers hoping that the retailers themselves would invest the time and money into upgrading the software used to process the transactions, so far not a single retailer has even looked at this option and none of them plan to either. The chips in the cards today can handle much faster transactions basically because they do not use the card number in any way to do a transaction, they use a unique code for each transaction which is why they are much more secure than the previous cards, the unique transaction code is a one-time use, and even if a thief got hold of it, it cannot be used again so it is useless to them.
Visa in particular with more than 265 million cards being issued already say that the only area left that receives major fraudulent transactions is the “card not present” style of transaction, this is usually done online to buy some goods which are then delivered by the retailer, these are always eventually flagged as fraudulent but it always takes some time and mostly the theives getaway with the transaction. Another reason for Visa introducing chip cards is that the chip is almost impossible to duplicate, where is the magnetic stripe on the back of the card is old technology and easily copied. Both MasterCard and American Express are also looking at software upgrades.