Discover and American Express Follow Other Cards in Doing Away with Signature Requirements

Discover and American Express (NYSE: AXP) are the latest credit card companies to do away with signatures at checkout for credit and debit transactions.

Discover and American Express Doing Away With Signatures

Discover’s new policy is going to take effect on the Discover Global Network in the US, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean beginning in April 2018. American Express said it will drop the signature requirement for all merchants worldwide within the same time frame.

Just last month, MasterCard also announced it was doing away with signatures at checkouts. For small businesses with a large number of credit card sales throughout the day, it means greater efficiency and more time to improve other aspects of the business.

“The payments landscape has evolved to the point where we can now eliminate this pain point for our merchants,” said Jaromir Divilek, Executive Vice President of Global Network Business for American Express in the release.

What does this mean for your small business? The answer is less paperwork and a faster and more secure checkout system.

While signing a credit card receipt is simple enough, it requires the business owner to keep track of the receipts and ensure they are properly stored. This is because customers can dispute charges on a credit card bill for up to 18 months. If you don’t have the receipt, your business can be forced to return the money for the purchase to the customer’s credit card company.

The new feature is being made possible by innovations in digital technology and the high penetration rate of smartphones. Jasma Ghai, vice president of Global Products Innovation at Discover, said in a press release, “With the rise in new payment security capabilities, like chip technology and tokenization, the time is right to remove this step from the checkout experience.”

Discover System in Place

With the implementation of digital authentication technologies including multifactor authentication, biometrics and tokenization, Discover already has a system in place to do away with signatures.

If you want to start using this particular feature in the Discover Global Network, you might have to update your point-of-sale (POS) system. If you have the right POS system, you can start taking advantage of this feature.

Discover is also addressing the issue of security for its customers with some additional safety features. This includes chip technology to prevent cloning, payment management credentials on mobile and digital devices with Digital Exchange, monitoring risky websites, freezing credit cards with its Freeze It service and more.

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This article, "Discover and American Express Follow Other Cards in Doing Away with Signature Requirements" was first published on Small Business Trends