In the United States, the main companies that manage credit circuits will make a decision that has been talked about for some time: from the end of April they will stop requiring a personal signature for transactions that take place by credit card. For now, the decision will have consequences almost only in the United States, but could push the same companies to introduce the measure also in the European and Italian one (where individual simplification mechanisms already exist). The Post has requested comments and information from ABI, the Italian Banking Association, and is awaiting a response.
Not all companies will eliminate the signature in the same way, recalls the New York Times. Visa will make signing optional throughout North America. Mastercard will remove the signature, but always only in Canada and the United States. American Express will take the most drastic measure: as it announced in December 2017, from this month it will no longer ask for a signature for any credit card transaction anywhere in the world (therefore not even in Italy).
The reason is quite simple: as Jaromir Divilek, executive vice president of American Express explained to The Verge, “anti-fraud technology has become so advanced that signing is no longer necessary to avoid scams.” For more than a decade, all major companies have added an electronic chip to cards that assigns a unique code to each transaction. Until recently, these cards were mainly widespread in Europe and Asia, recalls the New York Times, but for some years credit card companies had begun to penalize merchants who still used the old technology, the so-called “swipe” .
The introduction of the chip has made cloning credit cards very complicated and the spread of online transactions has introduced methods considered more reliable than simple signing, for example requesting a code or an additional password before completing the payment. In short, for some time now, no one has paid much attention to the signatures that are made on the receipts, neither the merchants nor the customers. A few years ago an American comedian spent the day shopping with a credit card signing in the name of famous people, like Justin Bieber and Vin Diesel: nobody told him anything.
The novelty certifies the progressive loss of importance of the personal signature, which began with the disappearance of checks and handwritten letters. In the future, it will probably only serve to sign important bureaucratic documents or particularly expensive or delicate purchases.
