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Comment by rhodysurf | Hacker News Reader

A lot of terminals are that fast but even a few seconds feels like forever compared with swiping and it going through instantaneously.

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Yes. All my EU bank cards also support contactless payment. But there is a limit over which you have to enter PIN to approve transaction. But small purchases like coffee at Starbucks I just touch my card with the card reader and it instantly approves. Taking money from ATM always requires PIN though.

I think rhodysurf means swiping the magentic strip on the back of the card, not contactless payment.

I pay with my watch or phone when i can actually because that is faster than both swiping or putting the chip in.

But yes, my original comment was talking about swiping the card using the mag strip.

Ah I see. Yes we don't swipe mag strip in Europe. The only time somebody asked me to swipe my card was on my vacation in Asia. That was first time I needed to do that and they also asked for my signature which surprised me as it was first time in my life I needed to sign a receipt!

I also use Apple Pay sometimes but these days I mostly default to contactless payments as the prepaid debit card I use for small purchases is connected to a mobile app on my phone where I can track my spending and get instance push notifications

> That was first time I needed to do that and they also asked for my signature which surprised me as it was first time in my life I needed to sign a receipt!

That's wild. Here in the U.S., I sign a couple of receipts every day.

That is wild! I'm very used to signing receipts as that is the way it is done with a credit card. With debit cards there is a PIN for the debit network, but we're told by the bank to swipe it and sign in (instead of entering a PIN0 order to get the full protection of the Visa network including zero fraud liability even though it comes out the same either way from the consumer's point of view. That usually involves insisting to machine that this is a credit card rather than a debit card.

I only use debit cards (a prepaid Mastercard for small daily purchases and VISA bank debit card for any bigger purchase or to take cash from ATM, plus my business debit card for any expenses while working so it takes money from my business account and not personal) and they always have a chip & PIN. I guess credit cards might work differently as you want to be able to charge back. With debit card there are no charge backs so it makes sense to always use chip & PIN process because it's very secure even though slower.

There is debate about the security of the PIN when the POS has been compromised. So the threat is that your PIN gets stolen and then you have to dispute unauthorized charges against your bank without the protection of Visa or MasterCard's fraud protection.

In the UK not only is the contactless payment instantly (I think less than a second, probably even better) approved but for the cards that I have in my apple wallet I get the push notification with the payment details in about the same time. And this is actual physical card payment not apple pay. It means that all the other background systems that are needed to trigger and deliver push notifications (over mobile network) are incredibly fast as well.

To be fair contactless payments are just as fast in the US. Its just the chip that is slow here.

Since I'm outside the US and couldn't find that info in the thread - just how slow these payments are? To me, waiting these 2 seconds for confirmation already seems slow.

Sometimes 10-15 seconds.

At Lowes (a big box hardware store) in a major US city, I'd say consistently 3-5 seconds.

Caveat that perceptually this seems like a lot longer due to the variable action flow (sometimes sign, sometimes take card immediately, sometimes error) that demands attention.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but contactless in the US is fast because it generally transmits magstripe data.

Apple/Samsung/NFC Pay is not mag stripe. It is generally faster than a chip card.

Apple and Android Pay are not mag stripe, they're proper encrypted nfc payments. Samsung pay CAN be a magstripe emulation, for terminals that don't support NFC.

To clarify, EMV supports tokenized transactions that emulate the _contents_ of the magnetic stripe over NFC, and this is what is broadly used in the US.

Note here[0] that Chase states that only contactless MSD support (contactless magstripe emulation over NFC with a dynamically-generated security code) is required for Apple Pay; a subset of contactless EMV.

[0] https://www.chasepaymentech.com/developercenter/applepaymode...

Here in Japan I get my payment notification email before the terminal is handed back to me with chip payments.

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