Europe is quickly making the shift. Nearly all the credit-card terminals in Britain, Ireland, Denmark, France, and Spain have been changed. Canada is scheduled to convert in 2010. And as many as 50 other countries around the world are converting.
The reason is obvious: A credit card requiring a PIN code is useless to a thief. European officials report that the system has significantly cut the credit-card fraud that grew after former Soviet bloc countries joined the European Union.
But US consumers cannot get these cards.
No US card issuer offers them, and according to the American Bankers Association, there are no plans to adopt the technology.
"It would be costly to change all the transaction terminals in the US," says Don Rhodes, director of risk management policy at the ABA, "and right now the industry doesn't seem to feel the level of fraud justifies it."
In theory, overseas merchants are required to accept US cards (which are called "mag-stripe," for the magnetic stripe that identifies each card) if the cardholder can offer a suitable picture ID to authenticate a signature.
"We have been quite clear that there are instances where a signature rather than a PIN should be accepted," says Sandra Quinn, a spokeswoman for the British payment processing council APACS, about a procedure called a PIN bypass. "But I have heard of problems."
Problems, indeed. Even Rhodes ran into trouble on a trip to London last winter. And over my three weeks in Scandinavia, my Visa card was rejected about half the time, and never accepted at automatic pay points where there was no live cashier. (Officials at Visa International, the world's largest payment network, declined to comment.)
So what can US travelers do when they are in chip-and-PIN countries?
