The Banking Dilema

A word of warning for those planning to travel to France – France is the only country I’ve visited where they bookend the financial system with the most primitive form of finance and the most advanced, leaving those of us from countries that exist in the middle on shaky ground.  France is one of the few remaining countries where a majority of transactions can still be paid with cheques (checks).  In fact, in some places that is the primary form of payment.  This is, in my opinion, the more primitive form of finance and has fallen out of favor in most of the world due to the rampant fraud and other issues associated with check-based transactions.  On the other end, typical, magnetic stripe credit cards that are used in most of the world are virtually useless here, at least from our experiences.  The “standard” French credit card has a small chip embedded within the card and is inserted in to the machine, much like an ATM.  However, the machine reads the card from the chip rather than a magnetic strip.  I can’t speak for others in the US but this technology has not caught on with my bank yet, making my credit cards essentially a useless occupier of space in my wallet.  To combat this, we have been forced to rely on cash, something that I rarely do in the US in this age of instant debit transactions.  Thank goodness for international ATMs!