wco81

BigFlyer

I don't think that's inherent in the technology, just the banks being cautious.

But, it does work for B of A, Wells Fargo, Chase, and presumably others with a card from the same institution that runs the ATM.

tmiw

Might have just been a fluke; I remember being able to use it with the Gear S3 without issue. You can also try re-adding it to see if that helps.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a technical reason why they can't accept cards from other banks using NFC. They wouldn't turn down the opportunity to make money from ATM fees otherwise.

wco81

I activated my debit card by phone and also set my PIN in the same phone call, using the touch tone pad.

So the PINs on the cards are stored in the network I guess. If Apple Pay shields the true number of the debit card, how would they do the lookup to authenticate the PIN?

tmiw

Same mechanism as with a regular card, I'd imagine. Ideally they'd just use the fact that a fingerprint/face was used as authentication, but I suspect that's actually banks being risk averse.

wco81

tmiw

Maybe this will help. It looks like that Visa will decode the token and send over the actual PAN to the issuer (or at least enough data to be able to translate back to the actual account).

However, I wouldn't think that in itself would make it impossible for BofA et al to process NFC ATM transactions for other cards. I don't know enough to begin to speculate what technical challenges prevent that, if any.

BigFlyer

BTW, when using the B of A ATM card through Android Pay at a B of A ATM, the use still must enter the PIN number.

wco81

Ah well that's kind of lame.

Maybe if Visa was acting as a clearing house to take these DANs and route them to the correct banks?

Or presumably, credit card issuing banks know the DANs associated with their cards which they approve for mobile wallets. And the DAN has assigned prefixes for different institutions like the first 4 or 8 digits of credit cards are tied to specific issuers and card product?

So they could have a similar scheme for debit/ATM cards maybe.


I don't know if ATM skimming is still a big problem or not. Couple of years ago, I used ATMs in Sicily and the receipt said they used EMV so it sucked the card in by some motorized mechanism and instead of scanning the magnetic stripe, it presumably engaged the EMV. It wasn't a brand new shiny ATM either, so I was surprised to see it.

Using NFC at ATMs would be cool but if EMV is widespread, that would be a good substitution.

BigFlyer

Just did an experiment at B of A ATM.

Instead of using Android Pay, I used my US based contactless Capital One Card and tapped the contactless pad of the ATM.

The card was rejected, and the ATM told me to use a Bank of America card from my mobile wallet.

Unlike Android/Apple Pay, using the contactless card provided B of A with the actual card number of the credit card. Nonetheless it was rejected.

This leads me to believe that the inability to match the card number with the issuing institution is not the reason that it only works with B of A cards, as it had my real card number as part of the attempted contactless transaction.

glennaa11

I was recently in Australia. Pretty much every POS terminal there accepts contactless payment. I had never used it before but was totally hooked and used it basically everywhere while I was there. The stadiums have gone totally cashless so using your phone or a card is required there. Google Pay was much quicker and it's more secure than using my card. It's a shame it is still fairly rare here in the US.

tmiw

I almost feel like the US is ultimately going to go with something similar to WeChat/Alipay for mobile payment (though it may take a while). The reason being that merchants are far more willing to adopt stuff that (eventually) bypasses Visa/MC entirely, hence why CurrentC was a thing for a bit.

That said, NFC acceptance has improved over the last few years, so even if a fair number of merchants never support it (e.g. restaurants) it may still be viable for day to day stuff.

(Visa/MC really should consider just biting the bullet and lowering interchange for mobile wallet transactions, even if it's only like 0.1 percentage points less or something. Oh, and simplifying certification too, since that's another factor slowing things down.)

freecia

@tmiw - Aren't the risk models different between China and US? Part of US CC payments absorbs fraudulent transaction costs and stores also have their own house cards which allow them to track customer spending. Most stores in China don't accept returns. Daily spending is also more stored credit & cash based, from what I understand.

PayPal tried a 2D barcode with barcode scanner a few years ago similar to the Chinese apps. It was pretty slow and during the period when other physical payment w/ online integration were trying out Bluetooth LE.

tmiw

You do bring up a good point about China. Credit card infrastructure in general was never really a thing there, so it was much easier for some sort of mobile payment solution to take hold. However, while the US does use cards a lot more, certain US-specific things do make it much harder to roll out NFC-based mobile payments. For instance, most stores use custom software on their terminals/POSes (vs. whatever the bank provides for the former and very likely no POS at all), which means despite having the hardware, significant development work is quite possibly still required on top of whatever was done to enable EMV--work that they aren't really inclined to do unless they have to.

Meanwhile, implementing a store-specific mobile wallet (or even something like CurrentC that was going to work across multiple stores) is likely significantly less effort. No need to get approval from merchant processors and/or the card networks, for one thing, not to mention that they likely already have software for reading QR codes with their existing hardware or can easily acquire such. And if done right, it can improve customer loyalty and reduce costs significantly.

On that note, Venmo recently got a "pay in store" feature. I could see that getting significant use if the pricing for merchants was right considering how many younger people use Venmo in general. Then again, they also recently started issuing physical debit cards, so who knows what their strategy actually is.

HeartFist

I can imagine someone being surprised when paying with your phone in Germany, but as someone had pointed out earlier, Apple Pay is not available in Germany (not sure about Android Pay). At least NFC terminals are becoming more and more common since most credit cards have contactless function by now.

On the other hand I did get a few surprised look here in the US already when paying with my German NFC credit card. The clerk will say "swipe or insert chip" when they see I have the card in hand and I just tap at the top and be ready to go.