While the European payments industry hopes its declarations will prod U.S. banks into upgrading systems here, there is little chance that U.S. card issuers can be bullied to quickly adopt the Chip and PIN system. Already, several celebrated attempts to issue so-called smart cards — such as the American Express Blue card in the late 1990s — have fallen flat. In fact, Jun thinks it’s likely the U.S. system will skip over the European system and adopt even smarter card technology, such as the Near Field Communication chip, which allows consumers to make payments wirelessly without removing their cards — or for that matter, their cell phones — from their pockets.

Nice to hear about, but it still doesn’t solve our wireless range issues at open-air markets….