why is running a card as credit even possible?

Question

USA scenario here: say I have a $2000 car repair bill and use my debit card.
Can’t be bothered to put in my pincode so I hit credit, payment goes through without pincode.
Why does the consumer have the option to pick here?

In: Other

Answer 1

There’s a regulation requiring payment networks to accept the as credits. IIRC the original reason was to enable asynchronous batch processing which credit allows but debits didn’t and was quite common with merchants at the time.