The National Consumer Council (NCC) has warned that vulnerable people could be left ‘high and dry’ when the chip and pin system comes into full force on February 14th.

From that date on, all chip and pin cardholders must authorise their purchases using their pin number, whereas at present a signature can still be used at the retailer’s discretion.

The NCC says that up to 3 million elderly and disabled cardholders will have difficulty using the new system, either because of problems remembering their pin, or through physical difficulties in entering it into the card reader.

While banks will issue signature-authorised cards on request to people who need them, only 100,000 have so far been issued, and the NCC says that banks need to do more to publicise chip and pin alternatives to vulnerable customers.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Chip and Pin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.