Chase and British Airways Co-Brand with Smart Credit Card

Sometimes Americans are overseas somewhere and pull out the old credit card to cover the latest expense only to find that something isn’t working quite right. Chase and British Airways are teaming up to offer a new card to help combat such things and spread a little airline advertising at the same time.

Already widely used in countries including Canada, the co-branded card is “embedded with a ‘smart’ chip technology that reduces fraud and is widely used outside the United States,” the Washington Post notes.

Just as America is the only developed nation that steadfastly refuses to use the metric system, it also is the only one of the bunch to still use magnetic-strip credit cards. (We are an ornery bunch.) The rest of the world has switched to chip-based cards, which don’t involve sliding the strip in order to complete a transaction. Instead, the cards are inserted into slots and a PIN is used to finalize the matter.

The new Chase/British Airways card will have the chip and the magnetic strip. “Card terminals overseas also have a slot where magnetic strip cards can be swiped, (but) cashiers in less-traveled areas are sometimes confused by how to process such transactions,” the Post adds.

“What used to be a trickle a few years ago has become a frequent point of irritation,” stated Naney Pandit, general manager of Chase’s card services, in a press release.