EU has contactless paying for a while now, but it uses a chip embedded in the bank card.
I went to England in 2019, at which point cards in the US had been updated to use magnetic stripes, and everyone was using tap-to-pay. It turns out my credit card had tap-to-pay support as well but it wasn't widely used in the US (or at least in my sphere). Now it finally seems common-enough here.
I'm planning another trip to Europe in the next year... Really eager to see what payments look like nowadays.
One thing that is annoying for foreigners with credit cards is that they are barely accepted here. We work mostly with Maestro and almost all Dutch e-commerce sites work with Ideal which directly link to the banking apps of the local banks.
My wallet does not contain any cash anymore and just an ID and OV card.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dutch-payment-landscape-one-m...
I haven't touched cash ever since covid hit, and very rarely before it.
The problem is that they have a local exchange there, and do not have cross agreements with all of the payment vendors (not at the Visa level, but bellow that). It was annoying, and caused us a lot of hassle. I am not sure how we could have avoided it.
Normal Mastercard/visa credit don’t work here since shops have to pay way higher transaction fees while almost nobody uses them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maestro_(debit_card) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_PayPlease
It will be phased out though in 2023 to Mastercard debit and visa debit so likely in the future Netherlands payment system will be more aligned with what other countries use.
That sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Why would we give these two rotten-to-the-core companies such power over our payment systems?
Maestro and V-PAY already _are_ owned by those two companies, and are debit cards. What changes with Mastercard/Visa debit?
:-)
From my personal experience, there were roughly about 80% of shops in NYC, up until the beginning of pandemic, that did not accept contactless or where it did not work. One particular supermarket next door had the proper POS for 3 years and it still wouldn't work even this May when I left.
The restaurants were even worse.
I always forget about contactless. I think all my cards can do it? Not knowing for sure is why I never try, and just stick the card in the slot, which always works.
I think I've paid with my phone one time ever. For some reason I can't bring myself to trust it to work 100% of the time so I can leave my cards at home, at which point I may as well just use a card since I have 'em anyway. I guess I could start carrying phone + cash as a backup and skip the cards, but that's even less convenient. I do activate the payment screen (iPhone) all the time by accident, though I couldn't tell you how.
(I'm not even that old...)
I generally pay with the apple watch if the store supports it (most seem to, nowadays). It is more convenient than reaching for the wallet since the thing is in my wrist anyway.
I always called this "chip". My UK friends called it "chip-and-pin" in 2012. But yeah, no idea what the technical or widely-accepted colloquial terms are.
> Not knowing for sure is why I never try, and just stick the card in the slot
Yeah, for some reason the UX for contactless is terrible. Sometimes something will show four evenly-spaced green lights (and sometimes they're blue--in any case, why does that mean "contactless"?) but often those lights don't appear until you attempt a tap-to-pay and then they might be delayed by several seconds. And even then, occasionally the hardware malfunctions and can't actually handle tap-to-pay. These hardware failures seemed to be way more common in the early days, but now almost everything does support tap-to-pay--you just often can't tell until you try which is just the dumbest thing ever.
> I think I've paid with my phone one time ever. For some reason I can't bring myself to trust it to work 100% of the time so I can leave my cards at home
I definitely do it as a last resort, but I've done it a few times (e.g., if I forget my wallet). Mostly on iOS I'm often trying to pay quickly and I try to activate the contactless payment but I'll end up turning my phone off or I'll try to bring up my card before my phone is close enough. The uncertainty always makes me feel way more anxious than it should and it's just less stress to use a card (cards also don't run out of batteries).
Having an Apple watch helps out a lot here. I can't do it on my phone either, but on my watch it is trivial.
Whenever "your transaction" begins at the register could be when you're eligible to present your payment to the terminal.
Fred Meyers here in WA still doesn't support contactless payments (QFC, owned by the same company, does, however), annoying since I still have to shop there often.
Some Freddy's do, at least intermittently. A few weeks ago, the one in Lake City had it enabled on their pads at the self checkout and I successfully used tap. But when I went back a week after that, tap was turned back off.
Kroger uses their smaller brands as testbeds for stuff and since QFC is somewhere in the bottom five for size-of-Kroger-operated-brands, I guess it makes sense.
It’s annoying I have to carry a credit card, driver license (WA doesn’t support digital licenses yet), and an Orca card (also, annoyingly not phone compatible yet) in the wallet MagSafe attachment for my phone.
Yeah, that was my experience as well.
> Fred Meyers here in WA still doesn't support contactless payments (QFC, owned by the same company, does, however), annoying since I still have to shop there often.
I've largely had good experiences all over the midwest, but there are a few Stripe card readers that advertise "contactless" but don't actually work (probably misconfigured?). I've been traveling around AZ recently, and I've found a few POS terminals that don't support contactless at all, strangely. But overall they seem pretty widely available.
The tech was mostly there a while ago, but hardly universally supported. This is one tech area where the US has definitely been notably behind the curve.
Besides that, literally everywhere allows contactless payments. Even Visa/Master is changing their card designs to move vital information to the back of the card to prevent information theft via hidden cameras or a very keen eye.
In my experience on such rare few occasions I was able to tip with Venmo.
I'm sure whatever country you're from (or otherwise alluding to) is a fine place, no need for the transparent insecurity. :) Narrowly, I agree that secure (and fee-less) bank-to-bank transfers would be preferable to CC.
> They are required for the CC transaction, this adds an additional player that should not be necessary.
We're positing a situation where CC's aren't available, so it's not an additional player but rather a different player.
A misstatement by me, still they are extra to what should be a bank to bank matter.
Good thing is you can actually use Apple Pay, I use my Watch to pay for stuff all the time.
You have to have a foreign bank account that supports it, I use Wise since it allows Turkish customers.
Of course huge amounts of stores offer contactless paying, but generally Cash is still dominant around here. Change is slow, and currently, Cash is still king, especially with small or street merchants.
For many small businesses non-tax registered money is the lub which makes them run well.
Jokes aside the price of getting a card terminal where for many businesses completely unattractive for a long time and often still are if put in context to the number of people which will use it.
I know one local takeaway which stopped accepting card payment after their terminal broke recently, as it wasn't worth it to buy a new one. Instead they now allow sending money by PayPal, but non-advertised and mainly for a single specific big recurring customer and sometimes if someone doesn't has cash with them.
Smaller stores or restaurants, forget it. Bring cash.
Beware, since covid, use of cash has dramatically fallen, last month a restaurant struggled to give me 2€ change, they didn't have 2€ in cash ! Paying in cash with the right amount should never be a problem though.
Spend is kinda hilarious - in supermarket checkout "can I pay $150 in cash and remaining using card?" just so you don't have to deal with coins.
It's weird getting pitches from US FinTechs that are solving problems that literally only exist because of how painfully backward that US financial infrastructure is.
I can't wait to live in a 100% cashless society but I do think that the process should be refined (especially for phone payments).
Atm I tap and often have no idea if I'm really paying exactly what I should be. Credit card/debit numbers should only ever be temporary and for a given amount to a given merchant (like how my bank requires generating an OTP when adding a new payee). Confirmation that we are paying x merchant £y is definitely required.
Current system is really weak in that if someone has my credit/debit number they can arbitrarily charge me, in the UK if someone has my sort code + bank they can use that at a business to create a debit request and I get arbitrarily charged.
However, most merchants now have terminals that accept contactless mobile payments without a limit -- Tesco were one of the last to upgrade. So if you pay with your phone then you're back at risk of forgetting your pin.
I'd quite like it if there were some mechanism for setting device spend limits, as my smartwatch will do payments but with only a pattern for security it doesn't matter that I'd be happy only using it for sub-£5 payments: it'll quite happily authorise much more.