Credit and debit cards that do not require a signature when purchases are made are to be rolled out across the UK following a the success of a a public trial in Northampton.

Signing your credit card slip will become a thing of the past as the pen makes way for the Pin in a new scheme aimed at beating credit card fraud. Shoppers who pay for their goods by credit card rather than cash can will in future be asked to tap out a four digit Pin number to authenticate the card.


More than half of all cardholders are likely to have the chip and pin type cards within a few months. The microchip technology that is incorporated in the cards is designed to make them harder to copy and it is hoped that card fraud, which is currently costing £425m a year, could be cut by two thirds.

The new technology is aimed at combating the growing problem of what is known as "skimming". This is the process of copying the magnetic strip on the back of cards using a card reader. The credit card is then "cloned".

The new cards have a thumbnail-size microchip, which stores personal data more securely than the magnetic stripe, making it harder to counterfeit. Finding out the pin number of a particular card is also much harder than copying a signature.

The British Retail Consortium and the Association for Payment Clearing Services (APACS), which are co-ordinating the scheme, said that more than 40 million UK consumers would be using the system by 2005.

Chip-and-pin cards are already common in some other European countries.