Walmart Suing Visa to Ensure Customers Use Pin

Remember when you got that new bank card through the post and the first thing you forgot to do was sign the back of the card? This signature is used to protect your card and help you prove who you are, even sometimes authorising payments. The latter of these uses is something that Walmart isn’t too keen on keeping, in fact, they are taking Visa to court in an attempt to require every user to require a pin on EMV debit transactions.

EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visas) are three groups that helped design the new chip-based system which is meant to replace the magnetic stripe systems that have been found in the US for years, even after other countries took the initiative and moved their systems across to a more secure chip and pin system.

While the new EMV system is meant to be even more secure, major card networks have stated that they would still allow users to sign away the authorisation for a payment under the new system in the hopes of helping users transition across to the new system.

In their statement, Walmart says the lawsuit is all about “protecting customers’ bank accounts, as if someone stole your card, copying the signature from the back of the card would be easy and still allow them to access and make payments with your card. With more and more users using systems like Apple Pay and contactless payments, using systems which can be bypassed by leaving your card in the machine or on your table at the restaurant seems to ask for trouble and unauthorised payments.