EXCLUSIVE – American Express is the latest card provider to get rid of signatures as a form of authentication for point-of-sale transactions.

This will go into effect in April of next year and applies to all American Express-accepting merchants across the world, the company announced.

The move comes as no surprise with more and more card companies viewing signatures as a futile form of authentication at POS.

By eliminating signatures, credit card providers are looking to provider customers and merchants with a speedier and more seamless checkout experience: not to mention, the advent of digital or contactless payment as well as EMV chips has only fueled this notion.

MasterCard was one of the first to announce that it would eliminate signatures by April 2018. Most recently, Discover said it would do the same. So it seems only logical for America Express to follow suit.

In a statement on Monday, American Express Executive Vice President, Global Network Business, Jaromir Divilek, said:

The payments landscape has evolved to the point where we can now eliminate this pain point for our merchants. Our fraud capabilities have advanced so that signatures are no longer necessary to fight fraud. In addition, the majority of American Express transactions today already do not require a signature at the point of sale as a result of previous policy changes we made to help our merchants.

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