Visa will soon drop signature requirement for Apple Pay, joining Mastercard, AmEx & Discover

Financial and payment cards company Visa on Friday announced that it will be eliminating signature requirement for Apple Pay and chip-equipped cards starting April of this year.

Chip-and-signature credit and debit cards issued by Visa in the united States and Canada, as well as contactless payment services like Apple Pay, will no longer require signature verification. This will remove some of the friction associated with using Apple Pay with a linked Visa credit or debit card to pay for purchases over $25.

Mastercard, American Express and Discover are also going to stop asking customers to provide a signature when making a purchase in the United States and Canada starting in April.

Obviously, this is an industry-wide move that will make contactless payment solutions faster and more user-friendly for both merchants and cardholders.

Visa says its EMV chip solution, which launched in the US less than two years ago, has helped decreased fraud by 66% at EMV chip-enabled merchants. There are currently more than 460 million EMV chip cards and EMV chip-enabled readers at over 2.5 million locations.