The big financial moments in life used to be marked with a flourish of a pen. Buying a house. A car. Breakfast.
Not anymore. Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express dropped the requirement to sign for charges like restaurant checks in 2018. They don’t look at our scribbles to verify identity or stop fraud. Taps, clicks and electronic signatures took over the heavy lifting for many everyday purchases—and many contracts, loan applications and even Social Security forms. The John Hancock was written off as a relic useful mainly to inflate the value of sports memorabilia.
But signatures didn’t die.
We continue to be asked to sign with ink on paper or using fingers on touch screens at many restaurants, bars and other businesses. And people keep signing card receipts out of habit—even when there is no blank space for it—because it feels weird not to, payment networks and retail groups say.
“Traditions have this odd way of sticking around,” said Doug Kantor, general counsel of the National Association of Convenience Stores.
Basically, the US banking system is made up of many smaller banks, unlike most other countries where there are fewer, larger banks.
This coupled with a large land mass with high population makes it more difficult to make the expensive infrastructure upgrades necessary for modern banking innovations like tap to pay and the loss of the need for physical signatures.
Many of these innovations are only making it to the US now because of larger foreign banks entering the US market, as well as the plummeting costs of technology.
Ehhh, the US has like half a dozen banks that represent 90% of the customer base and lots of countries have smaller banks. Canada probably has a more fragmented banking system and yet interact integration was pretty smooth.
The “big five” banks in the states actually represent less than half the American population, whereas the major banks in Canada cover about 85% of us. (Note these numbers are from before the pandemic - I’m no longer involved in the banking industry.)
The US system is still incredibly fragmented, though a lot of consolidation is happening (yay oligopolies). Canada, on the other hand, has had stricter regulations for longer, which meant that even the 15% of Canadians with small banks and credit unions were included in the changes to the industry as they happened.