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Square sellers no longer need signatures for card payments

Chip and pin transactions now take just two seconds.

Square Cash is continuing its crusade to make the business of parting with your hard-earned money a little less painful. It's just announced that it's cut down EMV transaction time on Square Reader for contactless and chip even further, to just two seconds, compared to the average eight to 13 seconds. The process uses a new "dip transaction flow" that prioritizes the parts of a transaction that are critical to security, which means less time standing in line, waiting for your card info to churn through to the issuer.

More pertinently, though, Square sellers in the US and Canada can now skip collecting signatures on all card transactions. Signing transaction receipts is a fairly outdated concept in many parts of the world now, with most payment networks outside the US relying simply on chip-and-pin instead. The technology's eventual arrival in the US has reduced in-store credit card fraud, so Square's removed this additional obstacle to payment. So that's even less time spent at the checkout mulling over how much money you're about to spend.