It's much harder for criminals to steal your information and exploit retailers' payment systems, but that's only in certain cases. There is no protection against card not present fraud or against the loss or theft of your card. Retailers are spending billions of dollars upgrading their payment terminals just to combat fraud against banks and not people themselves. Many merchants still don't have their payment terminals up to date, so in these locations cards containing the security chip are useless. Banks are spending all this money to implement this new feature into their credit and debit cards, and many stores haven't even updated their systems to use the card the way it's supposed to be used. Most chip cards require a signature, but only for certain amounts, but the problem is that there is no legitimate way to verify a signature made by that person at that time. Anyone could use your card the way it was intended, then simply sign, and that company would have no way of knowing if it was your card. It would be more efficient to have a PIN with every chip card, and the legitimate way to know that this card is yours is to enter your PIN. So instead of having a chip and signature, they would have to create PINs for each card for each transaction, regardless of the amount.