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If your phone has a fingerprint reader, I find that it's even easier to pull out the phone and tap, than to try and get a card out of your wallet.

Plus, feels more secure since you need to authenticate, vs anyone with your card can just tap it. (sure, usually you are not liable if you report lost credit card quickly)

What I'd really like to see next is for proper electronic receipts to be transferred to the phone, vs just the transaction total.

So that you don't have to carry all of your credits cards everywhere. Credit Card rewards are much better in US than in Europe and it makes sense to use certain credit card to make certain kind of transaction. e.g. one of my card given 3% cashback at restaurants but only 1% at grocery stores. While other gives 2% at grocery stores.

Plus, if you lose your card/wallet it is a pain to change numbers everywhere. While you don't need to do that if you lose your phone as real card numbers are not stored in the pay apps. Besides whoever finds the phone needs to go pass your lock screen to get anywhere near that.

In Europe not only credit cards are contactless, but also debit cards. Furthermore, in some countries you have to carry an ID at all times, so you would have your wallet with you anyways.

Regarding safety: contactless only works for rather small sums. Anything above that requires a pin.

Indeed. I only use my credit card outside the EU.

As another comment here points out. People don't really use credit cards here. Everyone has a debit card which supports contactless payments without a pin up to €20. Which is enough for most use cases.

Even better, in the country where I live, almost all debit cards have a number and a Cv2 code. So you can pay online at any place that accepts credit cards.

Transactions are free and instant. Within a second of paying I can see the transaction in the mobile app of my bank. Hell, it sends notifications for every transaction if you want.

> Even better, in the country where I live, almost all debit cards have a number and a Cv2 code.

You don't have this in every country?

Not in my home country. All banks give out Maestro cards. While the country I live in right now gives out Visa Electron cards.

>Can somebody explain why I'd prefer using my phone over this system?

Your credit card number is never seen by the merchant. A lot of credit card thefts are done by employee's lifting the card number details during a transaction[1]. With Google Pay / Apple Pay the credit card number is replaced with a one time token that is only valid for that transaction.

[1]https://youtu.be/qgu2NVrfRV4?t=44s

In Europe we have chips and PIN on cards, most transactions are useless without them so you can't do much with just the card number.

Though some transactions on the internet can be done without them but that's rare and diminishing, and that probably not possible for the contactless cards

You also have to take your card out of your pocket, right? So, it's altogether not much different in terms of "experience", but the phone has a nicer UI.

That's the thing I was trying to say. The card doesn't have a UI. With the phone, the fingerprint or facial recognition might fail etc. With the card, it cannot go wrong, you just tap your card on the reader.

It might fail, but it probably won't. Also your card might pick up static and not interface with the terminal. Or you might break it by bending it in your pocket (happened to me a while back). You say there's no UI for cards, but that's only the case for transactions under €20. With phone, no PIN required for transactions over X dollars. One motion for everything.

Then add that you don't need to carry a wallet if you have phone payment. Throw your phone in a sleeve (or use a watch!) and go running, stop for your smoothie on the way home.

Finally, since it's a phone I can call it when it's missing or my watch will tell me if it's in the Uber I just got out of. Even works when intoxicated!

In Romania, a bank started issuing watches that function as contactless credit cards last year.

https://embeddedsecuritynews.com/2017/06/romanian-lender-int...

I live in Romania. I got one. It's been great!

I see your point. One thing I've seen people do is to keep their debit card in the cover of their phone. Which is a great hack :-) You can just put your phone on the card reader.

Because I have my phone in my hand quite a lot, but I don't have my credit card in my hand at all.

To use my credit card I'd have to get my wallet out, find the right card, drag it out of its slot, etc. To use my phone I reach into my pocket, grab the only phone-shaped thing in there, and while moving it towards the terminal put my thumb on the sensor. Takes far less time.

You would not.

But in the US paying with card is crazy "slow," especially with the new chip.

> in the US paying with card is crazy "slow," especially with the new chip.

Does anyone know why this is?

Chip cards have been widespread in Europe for over a decade (in some places they've been around over 20 years). As pleasantly convenient as the new tap cards are, I've never found chip to be slow as long as I can remember. Sometimes a wireless terminal will have momentary connection problems but this is rare enough to be acknowledged by the shop as a clear technical fault and apologies given for the delay.

IME this mostly depends on the terminal and/or how the store chooses to handle transactions. Some terminals see to first need to establish some kind of connection to a server during the transaction, which can fail or take time. Some seem always connected or they batch the transactions and perform them at some point in the future. (Could be that batching cannot be done anymore, though.)

E.g. at Aldi here (Southern Germany) paying with card including entering the PIN isn't really slower than paying cash (and the Aldi cashiers are crazy fast in handling cash). At other stores the card terminals seem awfully slow, though.

As far as I had assumed (don't have any in-depth knowledge though), all chip systems required a challenge response with a server, so this couldn't be batched I don't think.

I can imagine it being related to internet connection speed if it was a minor delay, but people seem to describe really significant delay, even in major US cities where you'd imagine that shouldn't be a problem.

I’m used to the dialup-style delays but these are longer and happen at places with new equipment and high transaction volume, and they seemed to be doing real-time transactions before because even the magstripe transactions would immediately trigger the push notification to my phone.

I’ve been assuming this is some new, unoptimized codepath kludged into a legacy system because it’s very common but doesn’t seem to affect new products – e.g. Square systems are always a fraction of a second.

The one part I can’t explain is why at the subset of places which support both NFC and chips, the NFC transactions are at least as fast as magstripe when the chip transactions are so much slower.

I once heard the conspiracy that that the large banks in America want to keep the magnetic stripe because it's easier to do credit card fraud that way. It cost millions for the bank, but keeps newcomers away from the market.