A big complaint merchants hear from cardholders using their EMV chip cards at stores is that they think it’s slow - the transaction takes a long time to process when compared to magstripe. The process of swiping a magstripe card is perceptually faster as the customers swipe their cards and immediately put it back in their purse/wallet as the purchases are totaled, and the terminal works on processing the transaction. However, in an EMV transaction, cardholders insert the chip card and wait patiently as it authenticates the payment. Even though EMV adds only a few seconds more to the transaction, the perceived wait time is much slower from the point of view of the customer as the chip card stays in the terminal longer.
