MasterCard customers won’t have to sign receipts

LOS ANGELES - MasterCard customers soon won’t need to search for a pen anymore when they make purchases with the credit card.

The credit card giant MasterCard is making it official, eliminating the need to sign for purchases made on the card at retail, as of April.

Whether to sign or not will now be an optional decision for merchants in the U.S. and Canada.

Already, many merchants don’t currently require signatures.

“Eliminating the need for signature is another step in the digital evolution of payments and payment security,” said Linda Kirkpatrick, executive vice president of MasterCard’s U.S. market development division.

In a blog post, she said research showed the company that most folks believed it would be easier to pay, and that checkout lines would move faster, without signatures slowing them down.

The signature was originally designed as a security precaution, but MasterCard notes that chips, biometrics and tokens use newer and more secure methods to prove identify.

“This important step will improve the customer experience and eliminate inefficient, ineffective, and costly processes for the retail merchant community and their customers,” said Laura Townsend, the senior vice president of operations for the Merchant Advisory Group, a consortium of retailers interested in new ways of payments.

“New and improved digital authentication methods are emerging which bring better security to the payments ecosystem. Elimination of signature will help pave the way for adoption of these methods.”