Originally Posted by
Corsair66
OK, where else would one keep such a card? All of my other cards are in my wallet and the notion of keeping one or more in a separate location doesn't appeal. I'm still having trouble imagining what I'd gain from a contactless card over Apple Pay. It seems like a solution in search of a problem.
You're misunderstanding the order in which the technologies came in to existence. Apple Pay (and Android Pay, and NFC Samsung Pay) are phone-based implementations of contactless. Cards came first, phones came later - we just didn't get them here in the USA.
Contactless (NFC) payments are ISO/IEC 14443 protocol defined by EMVCo:
http://www.emvco.com/specifications.aspx?id=21
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactless_smart_card
The physical cards with contactless chips in them have been around for more than a decade. At some point, the phone manufacturers realized they could put a chip in the phone that did the same thing as the chip in the plastic cards, with the added security of a PIN or fingerprint scan before the chip activates itself.