Received notice recently that my Chase Freedom Mastercard will be changing to Chase Freedom Visa and the new cards will now have an embedded chip. Actually received may new card yesterday.These new cards will contain chip with signature technology which you will most likely encounter overseas. They caution that some unattended areas of use when traveling outside the US may not be set up to accept chip and signature and may require chip with pin number so you should have a backup payment method.
I've got one of these new cards and have been using it for about a month now. There are small changes that I've had to make. For instance, instead of swiping at the self check-out kiosks at Walmart, I insert my card instead and hit "ok". Lots of merchant payment terminals are not set up to use the chip yet though so often I end up swiping nonetheless. It's good to see the US "catch up". My wife and I were vacationing in Canada last year and everyone had a chip card. Sometimes my swipe-only card didn't work at some establishments.Unfortunately this is not the US "catching up". Chip AND PIN was introduced in Europe over 10 years ago. It is only when it has the PIN that it is much more secure.