Hacker News Reader

Comment by embedding-shape | Hacker News Reader

> We just got tap to pay a couple of years ago

You mean NFC payments? :| Oh, and checks too? I guess things were very different than my assumption, interesting thing to have learned today. Thanks!

View on HN

Paper checks aren't nearly so common for anything other than maybe a local tradesman or if you're renting from an individual. It's not uncommon to see high traffic places like gas stations refuse paper checks outright, or only accept them from local banks, as the onus is on the receiver if it doesn't clear.

NFC payments have been around for a bit but are only recently very widespread, COVID really pushed that forward.

The only notable big name holdout is Walmart. Somehow, they're still on either chip+pin or magnetic stripe cards only.

Walmart famously refuse to pay the extra couple of basis points that are charged by the various payment-rails-involved-entities when doing NFC payments instead of physical card.

We literally started rolling out chip-and-pin after tap-and-go was already rolled out in England (and presumably elsewhere). It made no fucking sense because it was obviously going to be replaced again, and chip-and-pin is a miserable experience. All it did was annoy everybody for several years.

I mean the physical credit cards didn’t have tap to pay most of the time until very recently. NFC has been around for a long time.

> I mean the physical credit cards didn’t have tap to pay most of the time until very recently

I think a couple of years before COVID hit most cards had it, but many stores didn't support it. But once COVID came and visited, all stores got new TPVs that could read NFC very quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com