The American financial payment system is much more lax about signature verification than Europe's.

Judged as of 2021. True if credible sources show that US card and cheque payment practice relied much less on verifying signatures (or other cardholder verification) than European practice, for example signatures rarely checked or dropped by the US card networks while Europe used chip-and-PIN or stricter checks. Mostly true if the overall contrast holds but 'much' overstates it, or it holds for card payments but not for every payment type. Mixed if the evidence is split across payment types (for example, laxer on cards but not on cheques). Mostly false if the differences are minor or limited to narrow cases. False if US verification was as strict as or stricter than Europe's.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Even in a coronavirus pandemic, some stores insist customers sign for card purchases American Banker · 31 March 2020

   “Card networks dropped the signature requirement to verify customers’ card purchases two years ago when more secure EMV technology became ubiquitous in the U.S.”

2. E2 Home | Mastercard Newsroom Mastercard · 5 April 2018

   “Mastercard announced today that merchants in the U.S. and Canada can forego cardholder signatures for in-store credit and debit purchases, effective on April 13.”

3. E3 Why credit card signature requirements are now a thing of the past CBS News · 13 April 2018

   “But most stores don't check the signature on the back of a card against what the customer scrawls on the dotted line, partly because most use point-of-sale terminals where consumers swipe their cards.”

4. E4 Why credit card signature requirements are now a thing of the past CBS News · 13 April 2018

   “MasterCard said that more than 4 out of 5 transactions in North America didn't require a signature at checkout.”

5. E5 The U.S. Migration to EMV Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Payments Policy Group · 18 May 2015

   “Card issuing banks heavily favor chip and signature authentication over chip and PIN verification for card-present transactions, an approach that doesn’t fully take advantage of EMV’s security features.”

6. E6 Payment Card Fraud Rates in the United States Relative to Other Countries after Migrating to Chip Cards Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (Economic Review, Fourth Quarter 2019), by Fumiko Hayashi · 2019

   “while other countries require chip card users to input personal identification numbers (PINs) to prevent fraud from lost or stolen cards, the United States has yet to adopt this additional safeguard as standard practice, especially for credit card transactions.”

7. E7 Signing Off: Mastercard Moves Beyond Signatures Worldwide Mastercard (press release) · 18 October 2018

   “Mastercard today announced that cardholder signatures will now be optional, both on the card and on receipts.”

8. E8 2016-payments-study-20161222.pdf (The Federal Reserve Payments Study 2016) Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System · 2016

   “In stark contrast, 97 percent of cardpresent transactions across the countries in Europe were made using chips in 2015.”

Federal Reserve sources say US issuers heavily favoured chip-and-signature over chip-and-PIN (E5), and that the US had not adopted PIN as standard practice the way other countries had, especially for credit cards (E6). The 2016 Federal Reserve Payments Study reports that 97% of card-present transactions in Europe used chips in 2015, which it describes as a stark contrast (E8). Independent reporting adds that US stores mostly did not check signatures (E3), and that the card networks dropped the US signature requirement in 2018 (E1, E2). This settles the contrast for card payments, the example the criteria give; the evidence does not cover cheques.