Originally Posted by
Ghoulish
If the US is an "outlier" then so is Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the vast majority of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South and Central America. Again, this was rolled out early in Europe because the banks there are supremely sensitive to fraud and often make it difficult to contest a charge.
US banks typically immediately credit consumers while they conduct investigations for claims of debit or credit fraud. European Banks, in my experience, do not give the consumer the same benefit of the doubt, often tying up funds until months later after they've done their utmost to disprove the claim.
With US consumers so well protected, not pressuring the banks, the cost of rapidly converting 1.4+ billion cards and tens of millions of terminals simply wasn't worth it vs the cost of fraud until recent years, as the technology became much cheaper.
No one I know is the US has lost money to credit or debit card fraud in decades. Yes, they've gotten bogus charges, but it's always quickly resolved.
Chip and PIN/signature and contactless are vastly different things. Not to mention that back in 2014-2015 the US pretty much had no choice but to adopt chip like much of the rest of the world had done (10+ years beforehand in some cases, mind you), if for no other reason than to avoid compatibility issues when we go overseas. At least this time we're not waiting until stores in Europe and elsewhere are no longer able to insert cards before trying to get used to the idea of tapping cards and devices.
(BTW, in 60+ countries,
contactless usage was already >= 50% of face-to-face transactions back in 2020-21. NYC only recently broke the 20% mark as of the time that infographic was made; every other in-person transaction was still insert or swipe. Those numbers are likely higher by now but the US is probably still going to have relatively lower acceptance/usage for a while.)
Bringing it back to the main topic of this thread: it sucks that contactless no longer avoids DCC. At least there's still AmEx (wherever it's accepted, that is).