Originally Posted by
alexmt
1. Plastc has a contactless interface. What will be enabled is the question.
2. You're living a dream if you think the US will end up being a primarily contactless/mobile payment country. This isn't based on any hard facts so don't ask for them, we'll just see in a year who was right. Cards, contact or contactless, are a better experience than paying by phone. I only use my phone because it's more secure than magstripe, but now I'm just using my contactless Amex in those situations.
Before Apple Pay was announced I pretty much thought that the US would never adopt contactless at all, even with physical cards. Mainly because:
- The US is nearly universally chip and signature.
- This means there's already signature bypass for small purchases, saving time.
- Without something compelling (like a switch to PIN or a credible NFC contender like Apple), retailers without significant numbers of international visitors would definitely cheap out on their terminal upgrades and you'd find a lot of places where PIN for international visitors isn't even possible, let alone NFC.
- Because of the US' always online authorizing of transactions, few cards support offline transactions, let alone PIN. This cuts out a couple of steps from the normal contact EMV flow and saves more time.
- Online transactions are already pretty quick here. With the above optimizations, EMV without PIN only typically adds a second or so (from card insertion to card removal), not long enough where contactless makes a difference.
- Plus, we tried contactless before. It flopped, partly due to paranoia by consumers and partly due to a lack of merchant support.
Now? In some ways Apple Pay is actually
better than PIN and traditional contactless due to Touch ID and tokenization. And there's the typical Apple ability to make people actually want to use their products, too. Also helps that there's now almost no cost difference between a terminal that doesn't support NFC and one that does.
I don't think we'll get there by October 2015, but contactless adoption will be quicker than it has been in other countries.