• Contactless cards are just catching on in the US, years after rest of world
    127 replies, posted
With all the CC stuff in the US I thought they would have that years ago already. Really surprising that even Germany is quicker on that, although debit cards are used here mainly, so maybe thats why.
Chip and pin has really just started to take hold here, but we've had swipeless for over a decade. Here it's been called paywave, and I know Wells Fargo had it back in 08'. I'm pretty certain its growth has been inhibited out of fear mongering, I remember a lot of talk about folks being able to steal your CC info from just walking by and such. That and a lot of people here still prefer to do things "manually" over perceived notions of reliability and security.
The only thing you have to be careful of is Aus is some shops having a stupid $10 min for credit or some shit like that. Literally everywhere is tap and go
That "high end novelty" of using a phone to pay is a standard feature of any Android or iOS phone with NFC support since like three years or so back. It's not really all that high-end, still a bit gimmicky though even if it does save me pulling my card out to pay for lunch. I am honestly shocked that the US wasn't using contactless, and has only really just adopted chip & pin, magnetic strips are fucking archaic. I don't think I've ever used the strip on my cards, having gotten my first card like 13 years back or something.
They're still used, albeit rarely, I had somebody use a card imprinter just last week at a book stall, they didn't have any outlet for chip & pin. With less and less folk using physical cash it seems like a sensible thing to have if you're a small business.
All the registers I've been to have said to "swipe, tap, or insert" on the screen for ages. I don't really see the point to be honest. It just removes security at little gain.
I dont have contactless and live in the UK. I know many people who are the same. Also some cards dont allow payments over a certain amount to be paid by contactless and you have to use chip and pin. And before many years, shops didnt even accept cards at all for payments under like 5 pounds. And dont kid yourself by saying “oh the US still uses paper money lmao”. All countries with the exception of China and possibly the some scandinavian countries do and will do for a long time.
It's not. People even complain about "those dang stupid chip cards" and "swipe worked just fine for decades so why change it?" Shit a LOT of places still don't even support the chip. They have readers that have the chip but there's always an insert that says "chip doesn't work, please swipe." And this isn't just small ass stores either, big chains too. I think the Albertson's grocery chain here literally only started accepting chip and pin like, a year and a half ago or something.
I've had many people accidentally pay for stuff whilst they're getting their card out of their wallets or purses too close to the card reader. Even though we've had contactless for a good many years in the UK there's still so many people who don't get how contactless works and will tap the reader for half a second and take their card away expecting it to be an ultra fast reader or there's people who wave their card around in circular motions far from the actual reader like they're doing a magic trick and seem baffled when i ask them to just put the card on the top of the reader for a second or two. One of my biggest annoyances are the people who become enraptured by their phone screen the moment they're done paying and forget to move out of the queue.
wtf How was Canada ahead of the US for this? Further, I'm more confused about apple pay/android pay/google pay Was the primary demographic for these things not in the US? These all rely on NFC
It's also often slow as shit compared to swiping it seems
The U.K. introduced contactless payments on its public transport system in 2014 London, the entire UK, what's the difference??
That's the part I don't get either. Before I left the UK I had a card where the chip didn't work for some reason and it was a fucking slog to get the swipe to work half the time for the week or so I had to wait for a replacement. If the store even accepted the swipe to begin with I often found my self having to show ID and sign the receipt in front of a manager.
Ever since I received a new card that does Contactless, the chip is extremely fast. Way faster than any other card I have.
I've had contactless for years now
We literally don't use paper here for our £5s and £10s now tho? and £20 and £50 will be Polymer too starting in 2020.
Surely not having to reveal your PIN to any nosey people around you makes it more secure. If someone grabs your card after seeing you tap it all they can do is go around the nearby shops and spend up to your single transaction limit (my card only lets me spend €30 at a time with a tap, I need my PIN for larger purchases). If they had your PIN they could go to an ATM and withdraw a significant amount of cash (or if you're as poor as me, all of your money).
This might make me sound like a crotchety old man, but I still prefer to use card & PIN. Call it paranoia, but I don't like using contactless. I'm also one of those weirdos that will use cash unless it would be absurd not to.
I work retail. And it amazes me how most people still treat their cards as some new invention they have never used before. It seems like even swiping their card is a foreign thing for them. Let alone them knowing how to put a chip into the machine.
magnetic strip was and still is the norm for most places, pin n chip's rollout here has been a clusterfuck but contactless cards have been around for a decade, the issue is that people were getting them skimmed all the time so most places made it an option you could request. my previous debit card was contactless
The biggest advantage to the world moving away from the old slammy-boy way of taking card details, except for niche low-tech applications like a pop-up stall, is that the card no longer had to have all your fucking details on the front. Credit cards used to have your card number, expiration, and name on the front, meaning it was a plastic vehicle for identity theft. Being able to move the information into digital form in the magnetic strip (and then into chip/contactless chip) means the card doesn't need to have anything on the front but the number and, if applicable, expiration. My debit card has only my card number on the front in un-raised text, since it's now not acting like my identity card for my payments. In 1996 Australia switched completely to polymer banknotes. Other countries that have switched completely to polymer banknotes include: Brunei, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Romania and Vietnam. The latest countries to introduce polymer banknotes into general circulation include: the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Cape Verde, Chile, The Gambia, Nicaragua, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Maldives, Mauritania, Botswana, São Tomé and Príncipe, North Macedonia, the Russian Federation, Armenia, Solomon Islands, Egypt, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and Northern Ireland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_banknote Boy, I love Scandinavian countries like Mexico and Russia and Egypt. You can avoid looking like an idiot by researching before posting.
Am I that alone in preferring to use cash? Physically handing over an amount of money, thinking about amounts and change, it gives me a better sense of how much I'm actually spending, versus just mindlessly swiping a card and not thinking about it. I don't know.
Well, I was talking more about the fact that the tech to skim these cards has existed for more than half a decade and it works are surprisingly long range. Also, our pin pads here have covered tops so you can't reasonably capture that info (which would also require you stealing that specific card) I also primarily use a credit card, which has no pin requirement, but it also can't be swiped wirelessly. I know you can get nfc-blocking wallets, but it just seems like an extra vector for attack with extremely marginal gain, even after using it .
Personally I pay for everything under $20 in physical cash. I just feel more comfortable using bills for smaller things. Larger purchases use the card because I don't wanna carry too much on me just in case.
I don't think I've seen a single person in my life who swiped their card like you guys describe it in US.
I had NFC in my credit card 5 years ago, had no chip tho.
Oh, this is timely - on a related note, some new law that went into effect recently meant that PayPal had to change their policy this month. If you have your own bank account already and just use PayPal as a supplement to it to pay digitally, nothing changes. But if you use PayPal exclusively and have been having them hold your cash like a pseudo-bank account - like I've been doing - that new law doesn't allow it anymore since PayPal isn't a proper bank, from what I understand by reading the policy update. So what they've done for people like me is - after you verify your identity (which I did a long time ago anyway) - they split their service in two, basically making a proper PayPal bank and importing your account details and balance into it, then linking your usual PayPal account to it to act as that same digital supplement like for other banks; it's just PayPal still handles everything. As a result, you can actually request they send you a full-on debit card that you can now use with your account, and I literally just got mine in the mail. Sure enough, it's got the magnetic strip (on the back), the chip, and yes: even the contactless tappy boy. All three. And like @elix mentioned, all the details like card number or expiry are now on the back. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/198768/ba4efd10-5109-41d4-acf1-2bc024b287cf/image.png Now, it's MasterCard-only due to some deal they made and my family's historically used Visa, but hey, I was shopping around for a proper bank recently anyway due to job-hunting after finishing training, and this came at an opportune time, both for my use and this thread. Plus they've got a nice fees policy (no minimum balance, monthly upkeep, or fee for non-express withdrawal/deposit; works for me). So, PSA: if you're in the same boat I was in, hit them up by May 7th, because that's when they're permanently retiring the old policy.
The swipe is just the CC info encoded into binary. Swiping just stores the information. The chip actually communicates with the terminal to process the transaction with the bank. Thats why chip transactions are more secure, because it doesn't require the merchant to store you CC info to process it, just the one time data to process the transaction. You can't simply skim information from the chip.
Ehh card processor doesn't really matter. You usually don't get a choice when it comes to debit cards anyway, as you said they have an agreement with a processor. For the end user it shouldn't really matter. They both offer the same services to your card provider for the most part, and no provider is going to be insane enough to not fill in any missing features.
Not from NYC (maybe an hour or so north), but I guess I've just gotten lucky because I've never had a problem with swiping the MetroCard whenever I've traveled to/through the city. The laser scanners at the Secaucus station, though... Those things never want to work for me.
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