Foreign Perspectives

Using a foreign credit card anywhere in France over the last 18 months or so has been even more of a nightmare than usual. Why? Well, 2004/2005 was when just about all the countries in Europe decided to move to the EMV standard with their cards ie to add a chip and require people to use a PIN when buying things; this was also the period that France decided to upgrade their card processing machines to accept foreign chip cards.

Net effect: chaos in the shops. Whilst in years gone by it was a nuisance if your card didn’t have a chip, over that period it was a nuisance if it did as the shop assistants hadn’t a clue what to do with foreign chip cards with many being refused. The reason for that was simple – the banks gave no training whatsoever when they upgraded the software on the card machines. Also, as things were in transition elsewhere there were three different types of foreign cards with chips: those with a chip but no PIN, chip with a signature and then proper chip & PIN cards. Worse even as there are two types of chip & PIN cards: those that require you to select a language first and those that go straight to English.

We found that in some shops you just couldn’t use some foreign cards. What happened was that if you had a chip card requiring you to select the language, a message came up on the shop assistants terminal saying “wait” whilst on the keypad it said “select language” so they wouldn’t give you the keypad and then said that the card wasn’t working.

But we now seem to be almost into the promised land…. Carrefour’s petrol station in Perpignan now accepts foreign chip cards. So, at least foreigners can buy petrol on Sundays once more, after a gap of around 10 years.

Arnold