Discover announced it will no longer require signatures at the point of sale for credit/debit card transactions beginning in April 2018. Mastercard made a similar announcement in October with the same April 2018 timeframe for implementation.
The card networks are quick to point out that they have the security framework in place to ensure all transactions are valid without the signature requirement.
“With the rise in new payment security capabilities, like chip technology and tokenization, the time is right to remove this step from the checkout experience,” said Jasma Ghai, vice president of Global Products Innovation at Discover.
Anything that makes checkout take less time sounds good to me, experts have said the signature doesn’t do anything to enhance the security, regardless.
With Mastercard and Discover going this route, we can only guess the pressure is on Visa and Amex to do the same. A larger question is whether individual retailers will take steps to eliminate the signature requirement from the checkout process. Once all networks don’t require it, they’ll be quicker to do so, but so long as it’s only Mastercard and Discover, I can see that being an issue.
