Chip and pin – one year on
February 15, 2007 by admin
Filed under News, News-Credit-Cards
It was more than a year ago that the UK was first introduced to the payment system of chip and pin.
February 14th 2006 was officially named Pin Day and consumers were told to brace themselves for one of the biggest changes ever seen to the way in which we paid for goods.
Of course it all went off without a hitch, despite scare mongering in some quarters that we would all suffer mental breakdowns as a result of having to remember our pin numbers.
To mark the anniversary of chip and pin, the UK payments association Apacs has released figures regarding the system and its implementation.
Apacs says that more than 185 chip and pin transactions take place every second, 138 million chip and pin cards have been issued and 98 per cent of all shop tills in the UK are chip and pin-friendly.
The association also points to credit card fraud figures, which fell in 2005 and are expected to do the same in 2006, while retailers have reported that transaction times have fallen after an initial bedding-in period.
“The rollout of chip and pin has been a tremendous success,” said Sandra Quinn from Apacs.
“Chip and pin cards now account for 97 per cent of all payment cards in circulation in the UK. As a result, it is now safer than ever to use your card when shopping, and far more difficult for fraudsters to get access to your money.”
Despite the positive figures, chip and pin technology was recently hacked into by researchers at Cambridge University as part of a project designed to test the system’s robustness.
