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Frustrated about how long chip card transactions take to process? You’re not alone. There’s no doubt that chip transactions take longer than swipe transactions. And, since extra time costs money, more and more merchants have been abandoning using chip technology — bearing additional fraud risk to save transaction time.

Visa is working to make credit card transactions safer — and now also faster.

While 13 seconds of savings may seem like an insignificant amount of time, it becomes quite significant when you consider how many physical credit card transactions occur each day — an estimated 200 million. That means that a savings of just 13 seconds per transaction ends up saving at least 82 years of human time per day. And, that’s just the cardholder’s time. Even more time is saved when you factor in the cashier’s time and those in line behind the cardholder.

Visa isn’t alone when it comes to speeding up transactions. Wal-Mart has already eliminated time-eating steps, estimating that it’s reduced average chip card transaction times by 11 seconds.

Results have already shown a huge drop in fraud when merchants use chip card technology. A recent study shows that merchants who had EMV technology installed saw a drop of 18.3% in fraudulent transactions in Q4 2015 vs. an 11.4% increase in stores that had yet to install the technology. And while we’re individually protected from fraud as cardholders, a less-fraudulent system hopefully will foster more credit card benefits for consumers.

Source: thepointsguy.com