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In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets--all of which can use EMV technology--are beginning to make inroads on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants--without surrendering any card info to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint.
Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. "It seems crazy to me," says Gumbley, who is English, "that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology." That's why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Says Robertson: "When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that's where the rubber hits the road."