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Comment by ca12et | Hacker News Reader

Additional question: why is it faster in other countries? The first time I used a chip card in the US I was astounded by how long it took. I had been using chip (and pin) cards in Canada for years and it was never as slow as it is in the states.

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Here in Australia, pretty much every retailer now has "paypass", which is the .au branding for contactless credit card payments.

Most payment terminals are connected to 3G or 4G mobile networks, and from tapping the card to confirmation of payment takes two seconds tops.

Transactions over $100 do require the PIN, but you can usually enter that on the terminal without being required to insert your card.

Paypass is actually the Mastercard version of contactless payments. The name is used in other countries as well. Visa calls it payWave, maybe retailers just put up one of the names.

Yeah for some reason paypass was just the one that stuck in the collective consciousness here. The points of sale have paywave branding too, but people call it paypass.

The truly weird .au thing is that many merchants take your card and tap it for you. A holdover from the days when people got confused by all the options in swiping/inserting and selecting an account.

I recall reading an article from last year, when NFC-based payment was introduced at the German supermarket chain Rewe. The author went out to test it, but the cashiers didn't know how it worked. The author himself figured it out for himself, and just started touching the phone to the cardreader at the appropriate moment, when the cashier was waiting for him to present either cash or a card. The cashiers were allegedly oftentimes confused by the reader beeping to indicate success, and two receipts being printed (instead of the usual three).

Also, while I was looking around to see whether I could find the original article, I saw an article describing that German banks want to eliminate traditional banking cards and do everything via NFC-enabled apps on smartphones. WHAT CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG.

Rewe is one of the better stores for this. Even though it didn't seem the staff was explicitly trained on that topic (the feature was just switched on one day), the register showed enough information that they knew exactly what to do. Never had any problems, only surprised looks. The other store is Aldi (actually both of them), where from day one every single cashier was trained very well on that and was happy to see a customer actually using it.

All the other stores created many opportunities for mistake by staff they badly trained and much confusion still happens today even long after the roll out. Most commonly, many cashiers demand a signature (on the back side of the receipt, where there is an authorisation text for using another payment technology) even though none is needed.

Yeaah literally no cashier has ever seen these payments, apparently. H&M, Uniqlo, gas stations, Kaufland, Rewe, the list is just infinite.

I worked for 1 week at a Kaufland (you could compare it to Eroski/Carrefour/Walmart) as cashier and I have never seen anybody else except me pay contacless so no wonder they get surprised all the time :)

Had the same. Was shopping at a supermarket in Germany and was the first person to use it apparently. Was then forced to sign (even though there was no indication that I would have to sign and doing so doesn't make sense for contactless payments). I tried to protest but had to catch my train so scribbled something random..

Ok, I'll bite: why on earth would German cash registers print 3 receipts by default? One for the customer, one for the store, and one for good luck?

Many stores print one receipt for the goods you bought (which is yours to keep) printed by the register, and two receipts for the card transaction (so one for both) printed by the card terminal. This is mostly for historical reasons due to how card transactions were introduced to German merchants. They have stuck to that and still design new so-called "hybrid" terminals which have a receipt printer and take the card in for the full length (so the flow for magstripe and chip transactions is exactly the same with no confusion even though magstripe basically only happens for foreign cards now).

Smarter merchants print muss less: Rewe, which is used in the example, doesn't print receipts at all unless specifically requested by the cashier and then only one which contains both the goods bought and the card transaction data for the customer. A merchant receipt is only printed in case a signature is required.

Probably Händlerbeleg (Merchant receipt), Kundenbeleg (Customer receipt) and then a normal Kassenbon (just the receipt with what you bought) but I have only seen the two customer ones in one.

> Yeah for some reason paypass was just the one that stuck in the collective consciousness here.

That seems to happen with bank product branding a fair bit. People _still_ talk about "pass machines" here; Bank of Ireland used to call its ATMs pass machines in the 80s/early 90s, and it stuck, for some reason.

I believe you're right. In .au they call it PayPass, but in .nz they call it PayWave. I believe some old Visa machines didn't support MasterCard, or the other way round. All I remember is my flatmate complaining that his new debit card kept failing contactless payments.

When first rolled out in New Zealand it was quite slow - as the EFTPOS hardware fleet was updated the performance improved to the point where chip-and-pin was just as quick as swipe-and-pin.

If it's slow in the US I would expect it's merchants choosing not to upgrade their terminals.

Same impression here. I lived in France when chips were adopted 30 years or so years ago and i do not remember them being slower than the stripe version.

These are completely different (mostly national) systems, evidently optimized for different things. For example, in the Netherlands there is still plenty of retailers that don't even accept EMV cards (there is only a small number of (mostly foreign) visitors that'd be interested in such transactions, also the costs of supporting these are typically higher than just supporting the national system).

Try to pay with a foreign card in France and you'll see it can be pretty slow.

Chips were introduced in France at a time where connecting all terminals wasn't practical/cheap. For this historical reason, most payment terminals aren't processing the transaction online in presence of a domestic card, even if they can. Offline transactions are very quick.

So if offline transactions are viable, and faster, then why doesn't the US use them?

They were viable 30 years ago, maybe not today

Edit: Forget what I'm saying. I may be misremembering things. Batch is a thing, but maybe not the reason why chip and pin is fast in the EU.

Like I say elsewhere this is very likely a regional thing, having to do with regulations that either require the transaction to be completed in one go, or permit it to be stored in a batch to be processed overnight.

I live in the UK and travel around the EU a bit (France, Italy, Greece, Belgium recently) and I've never noticed chip-and-pin being slow in any way. That's because in most of those countries at least, as far as I can tell, transactions are stored and processed in overnight batches instead of being sent online to be dealt with immediately, which may take a long time depending on the network connection etc.

From what I understand, most places outside the EU don't do batch, they send the transaction online to be completed immediately. Which can take quite a bit longer.

It's fast in my country (EU member). Like no-more-than-five-seconds fast. Most of the time even faster. And it has nothing to do with batches, because if I check my balance in my banking app I can already see the transaction there right after checkout. Maybe infrastructure connecting PoSes and banks sucks in US?

It's been a while since I worked for an EMV vendor and I didn't remember that very clearly, but sometimes transactions are handled entirely offline. It depends on what card you have and where you're shopping (or, more specifically, your card issuer and the transaction acquirer, who determines the settings on the pinpad).

The card and the pinpad together make a decision about whether to send the transaction online or keep it offline and this decision may involve the connection speed of the device and the amount of money you spend.

So, in some cases you might check your account and notice that the money has not been taken out yet. Or you might not even check because the amount you spent was very low.

Obviously, if the connection speed is high enough there's no point in staying offline, so you'll always see your balance changing pretty much instantly. But, like I say, this depends on where you're shopping, what you're buying and what card you're using.

> but sometimes transactions are handled entirely offline

It depends. Some readers are set to accept offline payments for NFC for sure. Reason being that they only sell small items (lunch boxes and stuff) and an offline payment is instant. However in most places you can only do three offline payments before an online payment is forced.

Here's an even more fun protip from the US chip+pin implementation: You don't need the PIN.

On most terminals, using a US debit card (Chase at least), you can press the green button without entering a PIN and it lets you through. Doesn't ask for a signature either.

Great question! Once I moved back to Romania after living in UK, Germany, and Israel for a while, I was pleasantly surprised how paying with a credit card here is almost instant – we even have contactless PoSes everywhere.

If you ever come back to the UK you'll be rather impressed. Pretty much everywhere accepts Contactless now.

Contactless POSes aren't really a thing though apart from Santander I think.

I believe the OP means POS as in Point Of Sales. Santander tends to have ATMs, as in Automated Teller Machines :)

UKs implementation of contactless is still behind other countries in the EU. In most other places I can use contactless to pay any amount, the terminal will simply ask for my pin if the transaction is over the pin-less payment threshold. In the UK that's impossible - even if the terminal displays the contactless logo when you are attempting to pay over 30 pounds, if you attempt to use your card that way it will just beep and tell you to insert the card. I'm guessing it's a peculiarity of UK banks which decided they would rather disable this system even though the terminals do technically support it.

That's not entirely correct. Some countries (e.g. Spain) have no floor limit and request a PIN, others use the same system as the UK (e.g. Germany). Wikipedia has a detailed list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactless_payment

I think the major complaint is (never tried paying contactless in the UK, no clue if that is correct) NOT the limit that doesn't require a PIN, but that you have to start from scratch and use a different method (insert card, provide PIN) if you cross that threshold. If that's true, that sounds like a UX problem and I'd hate that as well.

Here in DE it's not like that - or at least never happened for me. A transaction that I start contactless might (random verification or > threshold) require a PIN. But I never need to insert the card or get an error message like the GP described.

It is absolutely a UX problem. In the UK terminals will show this image:

https://cdn.barcodesinc.com/images/models/lg/Ingenico/ipp320...

Even if the amount is over the threshold - only once you tap your card on the terminal it beeps and says "insert/swipe card". Why even show the contactless logo then????

Not all do but the majority. I believe it's the manufacturer's fault, not the bank's (or store). But I guess in devices like this, pushing a software update to fix a non-critical UX flaw could take years.

Just a theory but is it possible that the prevalence of DATAPAC in Canada means that most merchants were use to having a dedicated always on line just for their terminals and continued to have one after DATAPAC went away?

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