Credit Cards Don’t Require Signatures. So Why Do We Still Sign?

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Credit Cards Don’t Require Signatures. So Why Do We Still Sign?

Putting your John Hancock on receipts has been optional since 2018, even on restaurant checks

By Oyin Adedoyin, WSJ

Updated Oct. 14, 2024

The big financial moments in life used to be marked with a flourish of a pen. Buying a house. A car. Breakfast.

Not anymore. Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express dropped the requirement to sign for charges like restaurant checks in 2018. They don’t look at our scribbles to verify identity or stop fraud. Taps, clicks and electronic signatures took over the heavy lifting for many everyday purchases—and many contracts, loan applications and even Social Security forms. The John Hancock was written off as a relic useful mainly to inflate the value of sports memorabilia.

But signatures didn’t die.

We continue to be asked to sign with ink on paper or using fingers on touch screens at many restaurants, bars and other businesses. And people keep signing card receipts out of habit—even when there is no blank space for it—because it feels weird not to, payment networks and retail groups say.

“Traditions have this odd way of sticking around,” said Doug Kantor, general counsel of the National Association of Convenience Stores.

Sign of the times

Signatures had been used to verify identity and agree to financial terms for centuries. Banks kept records of customer signatures to check against, but the sheer number of transactions and advancements in technology eventually made that impractical.

By the 1980s, charges could be processed electronically. Signatures were still used in cases of fraud or stolen cards. Banks could call merchants and ask them to present a signed receipt. Yet given how easy signatures are to forge, they proved limited as a fraud prevention tool.

Now there are more sophisticated ways to determine whether cards are stolen or misused, according to Mark Nelsen, global head of consumer payments at Visa.

Every Visa transaction is compared with the buyer’s normal spending patterns. If anything seems out of the ordinary about that purchase, it may be flagged as potential fraud. “Risk scoring really helped replace the need for that manual signature comparison,” Nelsen said.

Visa doesn’t look at whether or what people sign, but leaves it to individual merchants to decide if they want to include the line.

Why we still scribble

Businesses that keep the signature line either don’t want to alarm customers who expect to sign, or they still use older point-of-sale systems that print the line by default, said John Drechny, chief executive of Merchant Advisory Group, a retailer-advocacy group. Businesses that ditched signatures found that it speeds transactions, he said.

There is no available data on the share of purchases still including a signature line, but payment-tech companies say it extends beyond restaurants and bars. For contractors and healthcare businesses, roughly a quarter of their in-person transactions included a signature line last year, according to Square, a payment and point-of-sale company.

The U.S. is an outlier here, since in Europe and other parts of the world signatures aren’t generally required for credit-card purchases.

Anything goes here

Our signatures are irrelevant and increasingly illegible, now that fewer schools teach cursive writing and penmanship.

When Jacob Lew became Treasury Secretary, his loopy signature was deemed unfit to appear on U.S. currency. He crafted a clearer version for the purpose.

Jane Tierney, a notary in California, said people put less effort into their signatures. Some don’t know how to sign their names, she said. Others have to practice to match what is on their driver’s license.

On receipts there is more room for creativity.

James Green, a forensic-document examiner who verifies the authenticity of signatures for a living, said he once signed his name as “Santa Claus” at a Home Depot checkout. The roughly $200 purchase went through.

Daphnie Makris, a 25-year-old waitress and bartender in Maryland, said customers often skip signing. Younger customers put smiley faces, draw lines or place stickers where their signatures are supposed to go.

However, Makris feels uneasy when customers don’t sign receipts that contain tips, even if it isn’t required. She doesn’t want angry customers saying they didn’t authorize the extra charge.

“It makes me nervous,” she said.

Checks and balances

Signatures are still required on checks, but they aren’t scrutinized as much as other factors used to detect fraud such as the size of the transaction, the age of the account or the customer’s past behavior.

The recent rise in check fraud has caused some banks to step up security, said Kerry Cantley, vice president of digital-banking strategy for Mitek Systems, a fraud-detection company.

When Stephen Dupree’s mother, Betty Dupree, died in 2022, he was in charge of selling her home. Dupree opened up a new account with Fidelity where he deposited roughly $300,000 in proceeds so he could divide the money with his siblings.

Stephen Dupree and his late mother, Betty Dupree. Photo: Stephen Dupree

When he wrote a check of about $4,000 to himself, Fidelity flagged the payment because the signature on the check didn’t match the one he had used to open the account. A representative told him to try again.

“I took a pad of paper and I was just writing my signature over and over,” said Dupree, a 47-year-old software engineer in Washington state. “I felt like a kid trying to forge my parent’s signature.”