Visa: new technology for chip cards to speed checkout times

Visa is upgrading its software to process chip-embedded credit and debit cards to function faster — addressing a source of grumbling from businesses and customers who are often forced to wait for transactions to go through.

Though the wait can be just seconds, in today's economy of swipes and scans, the cards have been a nuisance for high traffic retailers, for example, a coffee shop during the morning rush.

"While chip cards have been adopted and generally accepted by customers, there have been some complaints the chip transactions take longer," said Stephanie Ericksen, vice president of risk products at Visa.

The credit card industry set a deadline of Oct. 1, 2015 for banks to issue chip-enabled cards and retailers to install and activate new terminals capable of processing chip transactions.

Chips provide significantly more security than traditional magnetic strips, because rather than sending an actual card number to a retailer, the chip instead sends a unique code that's assigned to the transaction.