There's more to it than face value. First, most issuing financial institutions will move to chip/PIN after U.S. consumers are used to EMV. The U.S. is the world's largest market and payment system deployment is extremely complex. To deploy both EMV and the requirement for chip/PIN is seen as "too much" out of the gate. Consumers forget PINs or do not pay attention to PIN mailers which increases call center volume significantly. No one wants to be the first to require PIN as a bad PIN experience for a consumer may mean that the card goes to the back of the consumers wallet. Additionally, in the U.S., the Durbin Amendment requires the option of two different PIN debit networks which adds a great deal of complexity and cost to card acceptance. It's not just a switch that can be flipped on.

Secondly, estimates vary, but EMV terminal deployment to merchants may only be around 25% at the end of 2015. As such, a card issuer is not likely to be overly concerned about requiring PIN because the process of EMV deployment will be gradual despite misinformation permeating the media space. And yes, and EMV card issuer holds the counterfeit fraud liability if they do not require PIN in the scenario you provided.

Lastly, the U.S. market is very different from Europe and other countries where EMV is deployed. As the last major country to make the conversion to EMV, there are certain items that are also unique. For instance, the increase in online fraud is of concern. When other countries went to EMV, counterfeiters could still practice their trade in the U.S. With the U.S. now converting, how dramatic is the increase in online fraud going to be? It may be dramatically higher than the almost inversely proportionate amount that online fraud increased as counterfeit fraud decreased in other countries post EMV.

The U.S. also represents half of the world's card counterfeiting. EMV was designed to address counterfeiting and chip/signature will dramatically reduce counterfeiting even without PIN. Lost/stolen is less than half of the amount of fraud attributed to counterfeiting, so the approach is "one thing at a time." Let's take care of the "quick hit" that begins the dramatic decrease in counterfeiting and then when consumers are used to leaving their cards in terminals for the entirety of transactions, then we'll begin requiring PIN as well. I cannot argue with this logic.