NEW YORK – The Wall Street Journal published an article this week that touches on not just the speed of service associated with an EMV chip-card transaction, but also inadequacies of EMV in the United States. Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, EMV in the U.S. does not require a PIN for increased consumer security.

“Yes, there are serious security benefits to chip cards, and the transactions will get drastically faster, from what I have seen. But the real payoff? The technology that supports chip cards is also laying the groundwork for the death of all plastic cards. Smartphones will replace our wallets once and for all,” writes Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal.

From a consumer perspective, the WSJ piece leans toward mobile payments at the point of sale (Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Android Pay), not just for the faster transaction speed but for an extra layer of security with fingerprint authentication. “In other countries, chip cards require a PIN, too. U.S. banks opted against it for credit cards since they feared an even tougher transition for merchants and card holders,” writes the news source.

The WSJ also raises the issue of consumer adoption regarding store-specific mobile apps. “[I]f the future is having 50 different store apps on my phone, count me out,” Stern writes.

While citing the pros versus cons, the WSJ says that EMV-supported POS terminals could lead to future adoption of mobile payment capabilities.

For the retailers, upgrading to new EMV terminals puts “the hardware in place to support mobile payments,” Randy Vanderhoof, director of the U.S. Payments Forum, told the news source. However, he notes that on the flip side, many merchants have had to put mobile implementation on hold so they could take care of EMV certification.

“The future is mobile, pure and simple,” Gray Taylor, executive director of Conexxus, told NACS Daily. “It is faster [and] more secure; and with developments Conexxus is supporting in other standards bodies to make ‘the app’ obsolete, mobile will outpace EMV unless mobile payment pricing remains artificially high. It is a shame our industry is being forced to spend $6 billion to implement the older technology of EMV just to get mobile payments. If payments were technology-driven, we would simply leap-frog the EMV step.”