Walmart sued Visa Tuesday for requiring the retailer to accept signatures instead of PINs as a form of verification for chip-based debit card transactions. Walmart says PIN transactions are more secure, and less expensive to conduct.(Photo: Gunnar Rathbun, Invision for Walmart) They’re upset that Visa is allowing debit cards to be run as credit. However, debit card issued by large banks have the same interchange/processing fees whether they’re run as debit or credit. It’s only debit cards issued by smaller banks that are run as credit will have higher fees than the same card run as debit. This is why some credit unions and local banks still have some sort of reward program associated with their debit card with the requirement that the transaction be signature based. Logix Federal Credit Union is one example of this. This multi-decade fee fight has gone beyond ridiculous at this point. Besides, unless PIN stops being optional it doesn’t really do much for security. Also, by “optional”, I mean like the 50%+ of stores that won’t even ask for it at all on debit cards. And the stores that aren’t Walmart that allow you to just push Enter or Cancel or some button on the touchscreen when asked for one anyway. It’s pretty uncommon for a debit (ATM network) transaction to be done without a PIN. I’ve always assumed debit card w/o pin equals credit card network transaction and higher fee. I had a Citibank Debit card that earned airline miles, but only on transactions treated as ‘credit’. This was because Citi charged/received the typical interchange fees for a Mastercard transaction and not an ATM transaction. The CARD act changed this and enabled the Federal Reserve to limit large banks to charging something like $0.22 and 0.05% on debit transactions whether were PIN based or not. There are some fairly edge exception dealing with gift/prepaid cards, with the large one being banks under a certain size.