Dutch Point of Sale system PIN ceases to exist...

This new year brings with it another historic moment. The PIN-system for Dutch cardpayments disappears. Here in the Netherlands, we had one of the cheapest and efficient implementations of point of sale payments: PIN. But the evolving technology (chip), fraud figures for magstripe as well as the increasing internationalization (European integration) made us migrate to Maestro instead. Of course this is Maestro with a Dutch flavour because the Dutch merchants have negotiated a good prices deal with the collective of individual banks.

Just for fun I figured I would provide a picture of one of the earliest operational debitcards in the Netherlands: a 'Geldkaart' issued by the Gemeentegiro (kindly provided by John Gigengack). So you can see where it all started here:

For the consumer the migration means that he or she has to dip the card rather than swipe it. And on the online-banking systems and account statements they may notice that the payments in some cases are no longer directly debited but first 'reserved' to be finally debited and booked some days later. Other than that, I expect that to the consumers the concept of PIN is not so much related to the brandname PIN but to the use of a card with PIN-code. So to them PIN may disappear but they keep on 'pinning'.