I just received a renewed credit card yesterday. What I found surprising, perhaps disturbing, is that there is no place to sign the back. Is this a new trend? It took some time googling but I found another bank saying they don’t have that any longer.
I only use it with the online retailer sponsoring it, so I am contemplating that instead of carrying an unsignable card in my wallet it might go into the safe. (Opening the safe is a PITA.) Then again, when was the last time anyone actually looked at any of my cards when I used them? Or, LOL, compared signatures? I suppose if it becomes standard I shouldn’t care.
The card it replaces was due to expire 07/23, while the new one is good through 12/27. The old card also seems to be missing the symbol that lets you tap to pay, but the new one has it and the paperwork points it out.
I have three credit cards, all Visa. This one only gets used with the online retailer sponsoring it. Another retailer sponsored card is used for purchases there, of course, but also for meals and travel. (That one also gets used for BIG charges, my grandson’s tuition at a trade school for one, as it has a very high limit. Love those points!) The last one is what I use everywhere else, for everything.
I haven’t signed a credit card in years. Most of my usage is online. Once in a while I’ll pay at a payment terminal, but I’ve never been asked by the clerk to look at the card (assuming there is a clerk). The one time in recent memory I handed someone my card and they looked at it, they didn’t say a thing about it not being signed (it was some house repairs and the repairman had left his Square widget at home so he had to type the information into his iPad by hand). Signatures just aren’t relevant for credit cards any more, so I’m not surprised they’re being dropped, and I don’t see any security risk in carrying a card that doesn’t have a signature space.
Is it possible your old card just didn’t support tap to pay? it’s a relatively new thing, so if you got your old card in 2019 it probably didn’t.
The chips have pretty much replaced signatures. There are still some merchants who use the older mag-stripe scanning, but they are often charged more for those transactions, as compared to chip-based transactions. It’s a lot easier to clone mag-stripe credit cards than it is to clone chip cards. If it’s a cloned card, the cloner can just sign it with their own version of your signature, so signature verification doesn’t prevent that fraud from being approved.
That’s not the new trend. The new trend is the customer handling the credit card themselves. The customer inserts it, or swipes it, or waves it, and then the customer presses “ok” to authorize the transaction. Since the clerk at the register never touches the credit card anymore, what good is a signature on it?