231–240 of 325 posts
As a result, there's barely any credit card fraud in Europe.
You can't expect the industry to invest in infrastructure if dealing with fraud is cheaper in the short term. You need to force them.
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Where’s the bottleneck? Gas stations. The gas station industry has been avoiding upgrading pumps. It's expensive. Retail checkouts usually just need a replacement of the desktop unit, but gas pumps require actual modification. They got a 3-year delay, until October 2020. Then April 17, 2021. Then they got hit by the coronavirus epidemic. The upgrade has to be done by a qualified installer; you don't want someone who…
Also some retail places. Home Depot is a huge retailer in the USA, but they will not accept contactless payments. I assume it has something to do with having to pay a higher percent per transaction.
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That's interesting, maybe we adopted contactless payments faster in part because in our gas stations you'd usually pay inside the shop. I have to think that was only one of many reasons, though.
Partly that, and the USA's much higher car dependence in general. I'd wager the average adult in the USA spends more time in a petrol station than the average European.
Edit: Bad googling, sorry. 57 mpg was proposed for new cars.
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Living in Europe, I genuinely had no idea cards with magnetic stripes were still in use. I thought everything used chips nowadays. I still prefer my card for contactless payments though; using my phone is not really much more convenient since my phone case holds the card anyway and it at least works consistently.
It's more convenient if you need to pay more than 25 EUR (or whatever the limit is where you live), where you need to use your PIN with contactless card.
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Canada was a lot quicker on the uptake with both chips and tap for whatever reason.
Less than a dozen major banks makes it pretty easily to roll out these systems in Canada.
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The USA is a big holdup. I just traveled across the country and there are still filling (petrol) stations where the only card reader is stripe. See also other comments about the stripe being a fallback for chip as chip readers on POS terminals seem to be more fragile than magnetic stripe readers. FWIW, Contactless is very hit-or-miss for me in the US; about 1/3 the time it just doesn't work at all (even with multiple…
Yea, the Achilles Heel of contactless (or phone/NFC) in the USA is the uncertainty that it's supported and the terrible UX for failure cases. How many times have you had this happen? Your groceries are all rung up and the POS terminal is waiting. You dig out your phone or contactless card and try to invoke the contactless payment system. Nothing's happening. You wave it around a little. Still nothing. Grocery cashier…
Since cards can have tap to pay, chip, and stripe all on the same card, I do not see the uncertainty in merchants supporting it to be an Achilles heel since you will have the card anyway. It might be an Achilles heel for Apple Pay/Google Pay, but not contactless/tap to pay in general.
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The USA is a big holdup. I just traveled across the country and there are still filling (petrol) stations where the only card reader is stripe. See also other comments about the stripe being a fallback for chip as chip readers on POS terminals seem to be more fragile than magnetic stripe readers. FWIW, Contactless is very hit-or-miss for me in the US; about 1/3 the time it just doesn't work at all (even with multiple…
> Contactless is very hit-or-miss for me in the US; about 1/3 the time it just doesn't work at all That's a shockingly high number. I'm in Canada, and I'd take a rough guess that maybe 1-2% of taps fail on first try. Most of the time it works on a second try -- and I actually think that usually happens when the POS system is slow and you tap too early. And in cases where it really is just not working, the fallback is…
Still a LOT of merchants that need to upgrade equipment to do chip cards including some large franchises. There is a real problem that chip reading devices do not yet have anywhere near the longevity that magswipe use does. Machines go out of service for repair and cleaning after as little as a month of use in busy locations. Magstripe machines typically lasted 12 months plus before needing attention.
In Finland they motivated the stores to upgrade by telling them that after date X they would be responsible for any fraudulent transactions done with a magstrip. The transition went really fucking fast after that =)
Still a LOT of merchants that need to upgrade equipment to do chip cards including some large franchises. There is a real problem that chip reading devices do not yet have anywhere near the longevity that magswipe use does. Machines go out of service for repair and cleaning after as little as a month of use in busy locations. Magstripe machines typically lasted 12 months plus before needing attention.
In Finland they motivated the stores to upgrade by telling them that after date X they would be responsible for any fraudulent transactions done with a magstrip. The transition went really fucking fast after that =)
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WePay and Alipay have their dual in CashApp and Venmo. The only difference being that Alipay has a lot more institutional support, ie. you can scan your QR code at the grocery store - not the case with Venmo (yet).
Venmo offers debit and you can add the card to your wallet