I'm not sure I'd agree on that for the US market. I suspect it took a fair bit of incentive on Visa's part to get Chase to bother rolling them out considering how the first attempt at contactless cards failed to gain traction. Not to mention that there will definitely be holdouts for various reasons (like Apple/Goldman Sachs and their upcoming credit card, whose rewards are clearly designed to encourage Apple Pay use).

Plus, if usage ends up being lower than expected again, it's very possible that issuers may stop providing them by default or even at all. On the other hand, if every other country ends up issuing them, it may end up being less expensive for US issuers to issue them too--even if almost no one taps for domestic transactions.

Isn't MasterPass mostly an online payment mechanism like Visa Checkout? There might not be a separate app anymore but MasterPass itself is probably not going away.

On that note, I'm running into more and more merchants in the US that use Quick Chip. While it only potentially reduces the amount of time the card is in the terminal (and not the entire payment process), that's what people seem to care about. When EMV is "good enough" for most people at most stores, what will get people to tap instead?

Anyway, I think we'll be getting lots of bonus points from US issuers for contactless transactions in the future. ^