So, one of Index.com’s big promotions on its homepage before it got bought by Stripe was “1-second EMV”. If you’ve been living in the US during the transition from magstripes to chip cards, you’ve almost certainly experienced the frustration of long chip card insertion times. With the swipe, you’d swipe and put the card back into your wallet in a smooth motion. With the chip cards, you’d put in your card and wait many seconds. In fact, most machines have some sort of a warning bell telling you to remove your card, since many people just leave the card in the machine, since it’s been in there so long.
Anyway, 1-second chip card is a big claim. However, I tested it out, and it’s fast stuff. (Bear in mind, this is a test card, not a live card. I’m not sure if there are any differences between test and production.) In this video, you see me insert the card at the 2.4 time mark. The card comes back out at 3.5 seconds. 1.1 seconds from inserting to removing. It’s another 2.4 seconds to process the transaction (that may vary depending on issuing bank, network latency, etc.) So, 3.5 seconds from insertion to having a charge. That’s way better than the 15-second waits you often get at stores.
It also seems that this device doesn’t do any sign-the-screen stuff. The card brands recently removed the signature requirements, since no one checked the signatures anyway. So, you can really get someone in and out super-fast with this.