The real news is Apple specifically took a non competitive stance — making the API available to third parties like Stripe - rather than building in house, leveraging Apple Card connections, or similar
They can always take a competitive stance later, once small businesses have gotten rid of all their PoS hardware. This makes that initial adoption much easier.
While it will reduce how often card readers will be used, card readers will be around for a while yet. In many markets contactless (atlest with real plastic) still has limits requiring the card holder to validate themselves (in the UK it’s a max of £100 per transaction and £200 over multiple transactions) and some card holders dislike contactless completely so have cards without it.
So in those markets you will still need supporting hardware for the times you can’t accept contactless or risk losing the sale.
The iPhone has a secure element that will allow for it to implement the SCRP (Secure Card Reader for PIN) PCI standard.
So this allows for an iPhone/iPad/Android phone/tablet to implement EMV contact/contactless payments (obviously contact would require a physical card reader). Contactless payments above floor limits (eg in Australia $100) can require a PIN that would be entered through the tablet.
For me personally, I only use my real plastic when my battery is low on my phone. So you have to account for times may not have their phone with them.
My bank allows for location based security. If my phone is not near the location the card is being used I then have to use chip and pin instead of contactless (dead battery, poor cell service, unable to get a decent location fix because of the building, all these can trigger the need to revalidate).
And a lot of people still don’t have banking apps on their phone (one of the reasons banks had to support SMS 2FA when implementing Strong Customer Authentication).
I’m not too sure if the banks/ Visa/MC would be too happy allowing users to enter their pins on the retailers phone as pin pads are supposed to be encrypted.
We are seeing cards come with biometrics and pin pads on them, these cards will help with “card terminal less” transactions, but both bans will have to start issuing them and card users will have to be happy using them (I still know quite a few people who refuse to use contactless at all).
So imo those BlueTooth card terminals will be with us for a while to come, they will just be used less, which is why imo Apple worked with partners who already have such terminals as a fall back for whenever contactless can’t be used.
Its done on your device, not on banks side iirc, but its an optional thing you can opt into if you wish, thats not the default config when opening an account (can also be toggled on/off at will in the app, so i'm not too worried about it tbh).
No, it's not done on-device. Think about it: they know where the merchant is for card-present transactions, so how do they know how far apart the card and your phone are if they don't know where your phone is?
That is primarily a US issue. In EU/AU/CA/NZ and increasingly in Asia, EMV chip+pin and contactless(+pin) are used and mag stripe is specifically excluded from the new standards.
They're playing the long game. Apple wants market usage to build bargaining power with the banks. They saw how the original Google Wallet was blocked from adoption because of control by the carriers and banks. Remember ISIS Mobile Wallet? (That name aged terribly..)
We saw how it took 10+ years and a dominating market position for Apple to show their claws with controlling 3rd parties with the App Store. Make no doubt that once a significant portion of the market uses Apple hardware or services for transactions, that they will want control and a cut of the transaction.
Notice how they say: partner-enabled iOS app
This means Apple has to endorse each 3rd party, and they remain under Apple's control just like app developers.
That's a fairly revisionist view of history. Large partners had earlier had special pricing (ex: Netflix) lax enforcement of rules (ex: Facebook). Blowups where Apple presumed the right to levy a fee are also well known (Amazon book sales, Uber fares).
The smaller fish got consistently screwed and no one was happy per se, but the sheer stupidity of Apple's recent actions do not help matters. For example, the app store cut is 30% unless you beg for scraps as a small business at which point you can get 15% until you start making $1 million. Income cliffs aren't how real taxes work (let's be clear here: Apple is pretending to be the government with taxes and fees and shadow court system of app review), they're just how Reagan demonized them back in the day.
Yes, Apple is increasingly competing with Governments of the worlds, in taxation of digital ecosystems, I am sure as they sabotage this market by these steep taxation, their will be blow back from governments as well after lobbying form business, They are not so small now like Nintendo that they can get away with this steep cuts.
Problem is that governments will retaliate by arm twisting apple to approve third party app stores, which will be bad for whole iPhone ecosystem.
If it's iphones have reached saturation with small business owners, let's build a business on top of that already dug and locked in moat, then perhaps.
If it's offering this feature is a driver for more small business owners buying and sticking with iphones and the accompanying ecosystem, you can see how it's perhaps the smarter play to be an open platform here.
Right - the last thing Apple wants is to let Google take the high ground of "only our platform makes this business-critical API available to multiple apps, therefore if you're a small business owner you need to choose Android."
It competes with anyone selling point of sale hardware. I think Square falls into that camp, no? I wouldn't want to be in that space right now. I don't see how this doesn't usurp a big chunk of their market since it isn't even a decision between buy this or buy that, but buy that or just use the thing already in my pocket.
This was my initial thinking, but then I think most businesses won't want to use a phone as their payment platform. My reasoning is that when I go into a business and I tap the Square terminal, I am assuming that terminal belongs to the business, because what individual would have their own square terminal.
If the person who is ringing me up has an iPhone, and says "just tap this", there is a part of me that is wondering if this is the company's iPhone, or their personal device? Of course, this is easily resolved with the right surround which would remove this question, but I think it's somewhat valid.
Isn't this how it works in Apple stores (I'm not an apple person). Don't they walk around with iPhones in this big chunky yellow cases, and then you just pay for stuff through that? Maybe I'm wrong...
Are you concerned about a malicious employee using their own iphone to steal the money? Why couldn't they give you their own square terminal? On that note, when you pay cash why can't they just pocket whatever you give them?
I don't see why you care anyway, they would be stealing from the store, not from you. You would already have whatever item you are buying.
A colleague of mine owned a lunchstand, where the cook brought in his own receipt printer and used it for a large portion of daily business, and later bought the business.
Because I can somewhat trust the Square terminal will show the correct amount? If I swipe some random persons iPhone, whats stopping them from showing a $10 total and charging $1000?
This is an interesting to think about. Say you're at an ice cream stand that has a Square Reader (the little square hockey puck reader) that's paired with an iPhone running Square's payment reader.
The merchant rings you up for $5, shows you the phone in their hand indicating the cost, and the Square Reader lights up to show it's ready for payment. You pay via inserting your credit card, which processes in a few seconds, and then the payment is complete. The merchant is no longer showing you the phone, and presumably hits "No Receipt".
However, the merchant actually has a second out of sight device that is set to charge $500 and is actually paired with the Square Reader. Because you've paid with a physical card, there's a good chance you won't notice the charge till you go to pay your credit card or check your bank account.
This would probably be a short-lived scam, as the merchant's malicious Square account would have to be linked to a bank (I think this is the only option), which would identify them. I'm pretty sure Square requires ID verification of some sort as well. So reporting this malicious transaction to your bank/credit card would flag them.
Additionally, if you're paying via a mobile wallet, you'll likely get an immediate notification saying "You paid $500 to Malicious Ice Cream Vendor".
Now let's think about Apple's new plan. It could be that Apple layer's it's own mandatory interface that shows "Pay $5 to Ice Cream Vendor" regardless of the app being used. Maybe this is actually the employee's phone instead of the company's device, but that's the same as the employee stealing cash out of the register, so not really your issue.
Or Apple could not layer it's own UI, and just open up the radio as an API. Apple could require that apps that use this API to have some additional verification to prevent someone from making an app that displays "Charge $5" when it's really charging $500.
All that being said, I only see smaller merchants using iPhones + Square Readers. Maybe some boutique stores, food trucks, etc. Once a store gets large enough, they usually want dedicated hardware, even if it's a Square Stand.
Wouldn't you just get a notification on your phone from your credit card or bank app to say how much the transaction is for and to whom. Then you'd know straight away that something is wrong.
Can’t you turn on in your bank app to get a push notification immediately on every transaction? I have this turned on for both of my credit card accounts, so literally within a second or two of tapping or inserting (whether physical card, or Apple Pay on the watch or phone) I get a notification telling me how much was just charged to my card.
Useful for double checking that something hasn’t gone wrong and I haven’t been charged the wrong amount! I’d also see if a fraudulent transaction went through.
Why do I currently trust any contactless payment terminal to debit the right amount from my Visa card ? The trust is built with every transaction.
The first time I used one of those strange little white terminals it seemed a bit dodgy ... but you pretty quickly come to trust that what's on the screen is what gets debited.
Also I doubt Apple would leave a nice app-accessible text field on the Tap To Pay dialog where I can insert my fake amount. Right ?!
So, yes, it is a concern about a malicious actor. Likely an employee, but hey, with just an iPhone and a big enough store, can't anyone just pretend to be an employee?
I would like to go to a store where I trust the business, the employee, and the entire pipeline. I understand that is idealistic, but yes, this is how I feel. It's like saying "why do you care if the employee is underpaid, you're saving money", which describes the whole tipping culture in the US.
Square readers are dirt cheap, like $60 or less. If an employee wanted to defraud their workplace like that, it's no barrier. They'll be caught when the shop reconciles things.
Why would you need a special surround? And why is that an issue for you the consumer?
Anyone who is going to be buying PoS from Square at a rate greater than just the phone attachment reader, this won't be sufficient for. Using a phone for a business you personally run is fine, using a phone as the central point of your business for even a relatively small fast casual is going to be a nightmare.
And for those even on Square Apple's ipads are still the preferred choice as far as I can tell. So there isn't much of a benefit other than fees.
For anything larger than a small fast casual you quickly run into greater integration needs with things like KDS (of which a few do use tablets, Toast, Fresh, etc, and even then I think ipads are preferred. I know Square integrates with a few of those as well as NorthStar so, I don't think they may have much to fear other than at the low end mom and pop stores.
POS and payment hardware used to be a fairly high margin vertical hardware business, but I don't think so any longer. The real goal now is merchant / customer acquisition and service lock in. Basically I'd expect the hardware will be given away at some point.
I'm not even sure there, at least for another few years. No store, mom and pop or otherwise, would want to be "tap to pay only" as a means of taking credit card payments. There are still plenty of cards out there that don't have RFID chips.
Payments and mobile service are some of the more weird things about the US given how easily startups or new tech is developed there. There last time I was in the US was years ago. I still had to swipe my card in a few places and getting a new SIM involved me having to talk to someone. By this time in Australia contactless payments were almost everywhere and you just needed to go to a convenience store to get a SIM and activate online.
It looks like they are going through similar weird things with instant bank transfers. In Australia all the major banks just have instant transfers built in. I use the bank app to transfer to friends and they get notified. In the US you Venmo or PayPal or whatever.
Yeah, the US is finally starting to catch up with contactless. Other countries have been strange as well. My understanding is it was popular in Canada for awhile, but then terminals started disappearing?
The first time I was able to use ApplePay (as an American) was on a trip to NZ. In fact, the clerk at the gas station was shocked to see someone pay with their phone, even though this had been possible with Android for some time, and even though contactless itself was old hat there.
As for the SIM thing, that just depends so much on the business model and regulatory environment. Pay as you go is relatively unpopular in the US, and the availability reflects that. But it's not like Italy, where I had to hand over my passport (!) to get a SIM, or Germany, where I had to document where I was "living". I've heard it's even worse in, say, Chile, where you virtually need to be a citizen or permanent resident to get a SIM.
Yea, practically speaking the physical card is just a trinket to get people to sign up for the card.
BUT contact free payment via card and Apple Pay contact free payments are slightly different and I’ve been to POS terminals that had one but not other. But the point was that there exists cards that don’t have nfc capabilities, including the one made by the company at center of article.
> I’ve been to POS terminals that had one but not other.
They are very, very similar that this surprises me. Apple/Google pay implement the same standards as wireless cards and it should Just Work(TM) everywhere the cards can be accepted. Obviously real life and 'should' don't always marry up.
But it was one of the big drivers of acceptance of the tech in most places - the infrastructure is already there! You probably don't even need to update the firmware on your reader!
> including the one made by the company at center of article.
Sure, but my point is that I believe that's deliberate, because they want you to use the contactless payment capability of your phone. I don't doubt there are other cards out there without the capability, I just think the apple one isn't a great example.
No one uses a mag reader here in Canada. Europe ditto, and sounds like the antipodes too. I don't know anyone who doesn't have RFID cards, debit or credit. Swiping a card through a mag reader is the backup option alone here.
I'm in the US. It's not uncommon here. In fact, two of my cards, a Chase Visa, and an Amex, both only support mag stripe and chip; they do not have an RFID chip in them. I could get them replaced, but why? Every POS system supports those; not everyone supports tap to pay.
The US may be an anomaly here, but it always has been. The UK had chip and pin roll out while the US still had mag stripe being the most common; we slowly added chip and signature (we still don't have chip and pin), and now we still aren't anywhere close to universal in tap to pay.
I assume Square makes vastly more on fees than on hardware, so the opportunity to make fees off more merchants who have a smaller barrier to entry is probably beneficial, even if they don't buy hardware.
Fees are definitely where the money is made in the payments sector, however, most proper terminals are leased so that represents a fairly large source of revenue for merchant service providers. A company I worked for were leasing terminals starting at £20 a month, and then took a cut of transactions plus a whole host of other bolt-ons like PCI non-compliance fees (which is it’s own racket, they’re not incentivised to ensure merchants are PCI compliant because it’s a significant revenue stream).
Square sells hardware, but losing money on that. I don't believe it is intended to compete with payment processors providing hardware, but more so commoditizes it/flattens existing players in cases where a POS terminal system isn't needed.
It competes with anyone selling point of sale hardware
No.
It allows sole proprietors, freelancers and the like to not have to get a Square reader to take credit card transactions. That's super convenient, especially for getting a deposit from a client, for example.
It also requires a newish iPhone (iPhone XS or later device), so there will still be plenty of iPhones out there that won't support this.
I am surprised Apple didn't make this a closed system and compete with Square for small businesses.
Apple isn't Microsoft. When was the last time Apple created something consumer facing from scratch instead of using industry standards or market leaders if they exist? They generally don't explicitly compete with commodity businesses unless there's something unique they're attempting to accomplish. They do stuff just because they can.
They partnered with the banks to create Apple Pay.
They partnered with Goldman Sachs and MasterCard to create the Apple credit card.
Besides, it would be a huge undertaking to build out a payment platform like Square to compete with them. Of course they could have bought any number of payment processors if they wanted to if they wanted to go that route.
Stripe and Shopify already have millions of customers so it only makes sense to partner with them.
The obvious thing most people on this thread is this being the basis for Apple's cryptocurrency aspirations.
Tim Cook owns some and he said Apple as a company is looking into cryptocurrency [1]. It only makes sense that Apple will eventually support bitcoin and other transactions natively on the iPhone, peer to peer.
> When was the last time Apple created something consumer facing from scratch instead of using industry standards or market leaders if they exist?
I'm too lazy to recall every detail, but it happened, often. Last exemple I have in mind is maps. As far as tech is concerned, I believe metal is their own inhouse invention?
I'm too lazy to recall every detail, but it happened, often.
Uh huh.
Last exemple I have in mind is maps.
They're working with several providers, including Yelp, Open Maps and Garmin. I've submitted corrections and additions to Apple Maps; anyone can do it.
As far as tech is concerned, I believe metal is their own inhouse invention?
Metal is a set of APIs for developers; it's not customer facing. Most users aren't going to know which graphics API their software uses. Apple supported and uses OpenGL for a long time and it's still available for backwards compatibility I believe.
It's a closed system in that the applications that are installed in the Wallet require approval from Apple and that includes fees as does the provisioning of the existing EMV and other Wallet applications (not the other Wallet uses like passes etc).
If course as the article points out, it wasn’t even new technology back then:
“ Not Exactly New Tech
Mobile introduced the Speedpass in 1997. Speedpass is a small device on a keychain (called a fob) that users wave in front of the Speedpass logo on gas pumps. The cost of the gas is automatically deducted from the user's Speedpass account”
I worked in the mobile industry back in 2010s. Every carrier had big shiny projects called "mobile payments" going on. They were exploring, together with banking partners how they could revolutionize contactless payments.
A key factor why all these project failed wasn't the technology. As you rightly point out, the technology was already available back then. It was mainly the vast differences in business models in the two industries: telcos and banking. The telcos were spoiled back then and expected any service to deliver a margin of at least 30%. Banks operated on a very different operating margin for the transactions. They never got that reconciled.
I remember back when Apple introduced Apple Pay many people were stunned by how little they charged. But in the end, that was their key insight to make this work. Quite impressive from a company with very high margins on their core products.
Honestly, I think it was Apple refusing to fully support NFC until 2016 that prevented the market from jumping on contactless payments, at least in the US. They were holding something like a third of the market back from doing it which really made selling adoption to merchants difficult.
Contactless bank cards were widespread in the UK before Apple or Google had their own payment systems. I think the "real story", as it were, is that the banking industry held contactless payments way more than Apple ever did.
Sorry for the passion but i was involved in the mobile payment scene at the time. It was not the banks halting the development of mobile payment.
It was:
1- Apple
2- MNOs (Mobile Network Operators)
3- Samsung
Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags.
To securely process mobile payment, you needed to have a secure enclave (SE) on the phone which would keep encryption keys safely. At the time, the MNOs wanted that secure enclave to be the SIM card, so they could control that space. Google retaliated by cutting some circuitry between the SIM Card and the phone: the SWI lines. Banks were charging north of a million $ to embed applications in the SIM Cards, and were charging you the same for any update. Apple at the time started charging 4 million $ as a deposit to acquire a special nfc permission (walmart and starbucks had one) to emulate a credit card.
Samsung was the worst. They were already embedding a Secure element in their phones without giving access to it. They started 2 or 3 years ago giving access to 3rd partys.
>Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags.
Yep, this was my experience as well, working in the NFC space at the time. Apple also basically forced the whole IoT space to start focusing on QR codes instead of NFC tags, because they were lagging technologically with the iPhone.
Contactless card payments and mobile payments are the same under the hood.
It's just ISO 14443 at the end of the day.
Mobile payments are just Host-Card Emulation (HCE).
Right, and with the advent of NFC in phones, US consumers didn't need the banks' permission to pay contactlessly. Despite this, contactless payment adoption was still slow in the U.S. even though most phones had NFC, it wasn't critical mass until Apple finally decided to support NFC technology.
It is today with different added features, but back in the 2010s you didn't need your bank to support it. You could do it with your VISA/Mastercard/AMEX credit or debit card.
I would argue it was a myriad of factors. Here in NY the adoption of OMNY and the pandemic contributed far more than Apple rolling out Tap to pay. The biggest issue being merchants lacking having the motivation to move away from outdated readers.
There was an attempt to deploy contactless cards in the US in the mid 00's. I used mine once at a grocery store. Merchants rarely supported them so banks stopped issuing them.
This is correct. The other comment that I can't reply to is incorrect. Banks not supporting apple pay were a significant holdup to NFC payments in the US.
Something I was thinking about the other day is how some modern credit cards technically have four different ways to pay. Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible, though I haven't seen a merchant actually do this since maybe the mid-2000's. Then you have magstripe, chip, and RFID all in the same card.
Pretty impressive backwards compatibility, although I think the original copy-to-paper mechanism is finally being phased out, since some new credit cards no longer have raised digits. (My new Visa from Chase has the digits on the back, and they're only slightly embossed and not in the same place. Probably wouldn't work with the old swipers.)
> Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible
I've seen this still happen occasionally in taxis - or rather I saw it happen within the past decade. When I last lived in the states I'd bump into it especially with rural taxis - I assume it's dying quickly though because it's incredibly inconvenient when compared to paying via an app or tapping.
The lack of raised digits is actually a serious issue for legibility, I've had the digits fully rub off on some flat-printed cards - this may have been a low quality printing issue but either way I wouldn't applaud it being adopted since the raised numbers make it easier to read by eye.
I've had a lot of taxi drivers tell me they couldn't take credit cards at all. That is, until I tell them "I have no other way to pay, so I guess... later dude". Suddenly it's, "oh, oh, oh, the card reader is working again, look at that!"
Whenever I get into an airport taxi I always mention "Oh you take credit card right?" due to the queue system at airports they either reply yes and, if they actually don't, I get out guilt free at the other end - or they reply no and I move to the next taxi down the line. A significant number of airport taxis do shady stuff to try and extract extra or under the table payment.
(Edit, just to clarify - I get out of the Taxi on the other end guilt free because the driver lied to me about payment options. I don't like skipping out on service payments - I think people should be paid fairly for the work they're doing (even if I could get away with not paying)... but if you're lying to me you're doing me a disservice)
This reminds of of when I was in Oslo back in 2014. We ordered food at a small restaurant after confirming they accepted credit cards. When it came time to pay, the woman behind the counter refused to scan our credit cards because they had no chips. (It would have worked, every other card terminal we'd used in the country still supported magstripe, and I saw that her machine had a scanner. She didn't say the reader was broken or anything, just refused to try.)
We didn't have cash, so we just left. The woman was furious. We hadn't received our food yet, but it was already being cooked. She screamed at us to go to an ATM a few blocks away, get cash, and come back. We just found another restaurant. If the card hadn't worked I would've felt bad and probably done that, but she wouldn't even try it. Don't advertise that you take credit cards and get mad when customers try to use them.
> It would have worked, every other card terminal we'd used in the country still supported magstripe, and I saw that her machine had a scanner. She didn't say the reader was broken or anything, just refused to try.
Just because the terminal has a magstripe reader on doesn't mean her merchant account provider accepts it. Plenty don't, or some transfer the liability to the store in that case.
> If the card hadn't worked I would've felt bad and probably done that, but she wouldn't even try it. Don't advertise that you take credit cards and get mad when customers try to use them.
In 2014 a card that doesn't have a chip might as well be broken. I don't think you can put this one on her.
OK sure, but in 2014 in Norway a card without a chip might as well be broken. If I turned up to a restaurant where you are, asked if I could pay by card, ordered, and then busted out my UnionPay card and demanded they accept that, would you say that was reasonable?
That's true - but they were widespread pretty much everywhere else in the world including Norway. Up here in Canada we tend to say "Do you take interac?" instead of credit - but if credit is just the way people talk about chip-n-pin in Norway the understanding might be that walking into a store with a non-chip-n-pin card and asking for credit is dishonest.
I'm not Norwegian but it'd be pretty similar up here in Canada at this point - if your POS terminal gets damaged and your mag stripe reader breaks there isn't really a big reason to immediately shutter your store and replace it.
Well, in all fairness, Uber mostly killed the whole taxi industry by being really really illegal and not following any of the rules - including those meant for regulatory capture and those for safety. About 3000 women are sexually assaulted by Uber drivers every year - I'm not saying that doesn't happen with taxis too, just be careful about painting a too-rosy picture.
No one painted a too-rosy picture. They just pointed out that Uber killed Taxis because Taxis ran on horrible service plus a government mandated monopoly. Take away the latter like Uber did, and there’s no need to put up with the former.
I'm not sure how it was in the early days of Uber, but these days Uber does background checks on drivers, and IIRC they have for quite some time. Is there really any reason to believe that cab companies would do a better job of weeding out horrible people than Uber? I can't imagine they do much more than a background check.
There is legal oversight and reporting required from conventional cab companies. And yes this was very much from the early days of Uber - when people cheered on the fact that they identified regulators and refused to book rides for them so they couldn't formally record violations.
Oh, a source[1] - this is why I'm extremely skeptical of the goodness of disrupting. Building a new competitor that can straight up out compete existing monopolies is one thing but beating existing companies by refusing to play by the same rules removes the power of law from society.
It was super depressing at the time to hear the Libertarian crowd come out in staunch defense of this program.
Building a new competitor that can straight up out compete existing monopolies is one thing but beating existing companies by refusing to play by the same rules removes the power of law from society.
Look up the definition of "regulatory capture," and you'll see a photo of a taxicab, or at least you should. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law... nor should they.
They run the background checks, but they might not take any action on the result of them. A friend of a friend is a registered sex offender who drives for them. They stalled him for about 6 months, but ended up allowing him to drive when he was still willing to after the long delay.
Taxi in a lot of places, and I’ve been to many countries, don’t follow the rules either. Turn off meter, take long route, all the shady stuff, pretend to not understand foreigners
Cards are slowly moving towards not having printed numbers at all, and having the numbers only available via the issuer's app or website. This allows for rotating numbers.
Rotating numbers are still extremely viable with fixed card numbers - it's possible to issue a set of semi-permenant printed numbers and also offer a tool that can issue additional digits for untrustworthy retailers or strange one-off payments. The removal of digits from the card itself is a cost being levied on the customer and it provides no real benefit.
Cards are moving towards no card at all i.e. virtual cards. USA is very slow in adopting new payment technology compared to the rest of the world. I live in South Africa and tap to pay is so much of a thing that you do not have to worry if you leave your card at home as you can tap at like 80% of the merchants, and if you can't they will have a fall back like QR code etc, NFC enabled cards have been around for years and all the merchants are really quick in adopting them.
In the UK my current debit card for my good bank is a flat black rectangle with the Mastercard Logo (overlapping circles) the name of the bank, the chip connector, and an arrow (for those with reasonable vision to determine correct orientation if they've never seen a chip before). From a Tactile point of view it has an indentation (orientation again) and a single Braille-like bump signifying "This is your debit card" (other cards may have more bumps).
On the back though it has a lot of details about the account, who I am, validity and so on, so all the same data is on the card, just not on the front and not embossed.
Current era bank cards aren't bright enough to change their numbers though, many of them are scarcely "smarter" than they were when they were completely passive, just barely enough going on to make it trickier to counterfeit them, not really any attempt to actually make that truly impossible for the majority of banks and customers. From the bank's point of view if they spend $5 per card to avoid $3 per card of fraud, they wasted $2 per card, and if half that fraud lands on the customer (because Mrs Smith didn't notice or the bank successfully prevented her claiming her money back and blamed her for the loss instead) they wasted $3.50.
The Apple credit card only shows the number if you reveal it in Apple Wallet app. Their card, technically run by Goldman Sachs, is all white with no numbers. Not sire how to verify but I've heard if you use it with Apple Pay I think it doesn't use that number, but a rotating one.
It can use a rotating number, I think, but when I tap my watch, any receipt with shows me the last four digits still shows me the same last four digits. Apple rotates the CVV, but not the card number so much.
I thought the whole point of the rotation was to make it hard to track credit card purchases across stores etc. Just rotating the CVV is a nice security feature but definitely not that.
In Italy, debit cards have numbers that are not embossed (however they are slightly "engraved" i.e. the number forms a slight depression on the card - basically the opposite of embossing). IIRC I've seen the same in other EU countries. I now live in Australia and in my experience, here all cards are embossed, no matter if they are credit or debit cards.
Most new cards that I have seen in Australia doesn't have embossing, they have flat surface. The number is simply printed on the back. Many banks allow you to lock the card using the App as well.
> "I wouldn't applaud it being adopted since the raised numbers make it easier to read by eye."
I disagree with this. The new-style card numbers are printed in a much more legible typeface, with more contrast than the old raised numbers. Much easier to read IMO, although the blind may disagree! I've had no issues with the ink wearing off on any of my cards.
I had my card taken that way five-ish years ago. It was on a ferry where presumably there wasn't enough service to use a digital reader. Or maybe the system was just down. I never knew that was an option until then!
I was on a train a few years back and the snack cart had to go cash-only when we were in cellular dead zones. I guess it depends on the operator's risk tolerance - you can't tell if a card is declined until the customer is long gone, but if the dead zones are big enough you'll get fewer sales because so many people don't carry cash anymore.
One of the hotels I used to stay at did this too, they had a modern card terminal when you checked out, but they took impressions of cards during check-in. It doesn't really do much of anything in the modern era, but you felt like it was doing something and that's enough. Card payments have two separate uncorrelated steps. Authorisation and Settlement.
In the Authorisation step, the merchant on behalf of the network can decide whether you, the supposed card holder, are authorised to make this payment. For example if you have Chip-and-PIN this is the step where a PIN failure means they won't give you the bottle of whiskey you just pointed at through the glass.
To be effective Authorisation must happen up front. With Chip cards, (and also contactless payment) this can happen even offline, because the Chip can carry policy decisions like "Offline payment of up to $10 each time, $100 total before I talk to the network is OK, after that No more until I see a network" inside it.
Impression machines were the very most rudimentary type of "Authorisation", the impression recorded is some evidence they actually saw your card. Or a card embossed with the same numbers, at some point. Modern networks don't want the useless paper trail which results, but some impression machines are still out there and hey, it felt like a "real" card payment. The fact they're essentially useless doesn't matter because...
The Settlement step is separate, and often happens hours, or even days later. In this step the Merchant says, hey Payment Network, I'm Some Big Merchant and I want $123 from your customer #9876.
You might think, aha, and now they provide details from that authorisation right? Right? Nope. It's totally unauthenticated, subject to all manner of glitches and mistakes, and it is based entirely on trust. The big merchants are rich, so, if they sometimes lie and steal that's OK. Whereas if you, Mr Wage Earner, don't pay for that can of Pepsi, you're a criminal and you're going to jail.
If some merchant in say, Spain decides you just spend €546 on a TV with your card, even though you've never visited Europe, that just works. Left to itself, €546 plus conversion costs goes on your card account. To reverse that you'd have to notice the €546 charge, call your bank and complain about this clearly fraudulent card transaction. They're not always going to magically detect it, they should have some anti-fraud pattern matching e.g. if that store suddenly claims everybody living in your town in Ohio bought a TV from them, that's suspicious, it probably doesn't go through, and hey if you never visited Europe maybe that's enough to block it, but not necessarily. The responsibility sadly always stays with you to report any bogus transactions that get through even though the Card Networks made barely any effort to prevent fraud. So, read your card statements.
From what I know is CVV isn't required if the card is presented in person. The card processor will revoke your agreement if you verify the card is present and it's actually not however.
Which is why I have a habit of removing the cvv from the card(scratching the numbers off) and just remember those 3 digits like an extra pin. This practice is becoming obsolete with MFA solutions like 3Dsecure
I'm not sure if this is still the case. But some years ago when paying with a mag stripe card in two South American countries seemed to type the CVV code on the POS terminal. This was different from other countries where they type the last four digits of the card number.
Is that right? My understanding is the physical AppleCard has a fixed number that is simply not printed and relies on rotating CVV via the standard chip reading like most standard chip cards. The device-based ApplePay can rotate its number but that too only rotates CVV by default.
My point was only that the card-chip associated number, the ApplePay associated number, and the number the user hands out to web sites, are not correlated. The user could choose to change their CC number every day when they wake up if they want, and the physical card does not change in any way as a result. Nor does it need to, since you cannot use it outside of the card.
Only one of my cards actually has raised numbers and its about to expire, so will probably get a completely flat one that replaces it as well. 2 of my cards are tap only, the mag stripe is gone - they are also store-specific cards, so that might have something to do with it.
Master card said they will start phasing out mag strip in 2024.
Yeah, here in Canada the magstrip has all but gone the way of the dodo - it's chip-and-pin or tap everywhere here. IIRC vendors here stopped taking magstrips before the Americans even.
Cards still have magstrips on them but I can't remember the last time one got used. Maybe a gas station.
Same in Aus. I think banking innovation like this is way easier in smaller countries like australia because there’s way fewer banks. The USA has hundreds of banks - so getting them to all agree on a standard is near impossible. It’s no wonder America still uses ACH and cheques.
Australia has just 6 banks. And they have a history of collaborating on things like this - since a fluid economy raises all boats, and fraud hurts them all. All Australian cards and point of sale systems support chips and taps. And have for nearly a decade.
There's a similar situation in Switzerland, where a handful of banks dominate the national market despite some smaller (cantonal) options that mostly have their own consortium anyway. The larger banks cooperated on creating a mobile payments platform known as TWINT [1], which allows for fast and free individual payments for splitting the cost of a meal, private sales, or even many in-store transactions. This allows them a competitive advantage over alternatives such as small Swiss banks or foreign banks that the many non-Swiss residents in Switzerland may otherwise continue using. These other options are relegated to IBAN transfers which are notably less convenient.
I think the problem is less the country size and more that the USA had a legislative structure that encouraged small, local banks until recently (1980 iirc) and so before then there was a Cambrian explosion of banks (pardon the pun). Now banks are gradually consolidating, but they have nothing close to the oligopoly that you see in countries without that sort of history.
Was? Most of the ones I use are still magstripe-based ("remove your card quickly"). Only occasionally it says "leave card inserted" which is where (I assume) it's talking to the chip.
> Cards still have magstrips on them but I can't remember the last time one got used.
But the chips are relatively flaky and often don't work. At least here (California) after three failed chip communication attempts, the terminal allows a magstripe swipe instead as a backup. Happens quite often.
> Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible
I actually had to do this in 2013! Working as a waiter at Chili's, whenever the power went out (happened once or twice the year I worked there) we'd dig out a quite heavy apparatus and make carbon copies of the credit cards. Every time I used it, my customers commented they'd never seen such a thing before (I suppose the clientele was either too young or had bad memories).
Earlier last year, I was at Shake Shack when their online payment system went down. They decided to just stop charging people (even if they had cash!) and gave out free meals. I much prefer that system.
> "Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible, though I haven't seen a merchant actually do this since maybe the mid-2000's."
I've noticed all the UK-issued cards I've received in the last year or two no longer have the raised numbers. Just the same details printed in ink on the card. Quite an improvement as the card details are easier to read now!
Still seem to have the traditional (but almost never used) magnetic stripe, however.
The numbers are no longer raised on my US Amazon card, but due to gray-on-gray the numbers are much harder to read. Smaller numbers give more white space for a very clean design. So I get to see much better modern UX as I squint to read my card.
Not sure about Europe, but here in the US you can use the magstripe if your chip is broken. After three failed scans with the chip it lets you use the magstripe. I've always felt like it defeats the purpose - if the idea is that the chip is harder to clone, couldn't scammers just make fake cards with phony chips, and do that when they use it?
I'd say maybe it raises fraud alerts faster, but I had a friend who did this for every credit payment for like two months before she finally had them replace her broken card. (No idea why, since it was free.)
> "Not sure about Europe, but here in the US you can use the magstripe if your chip is broken."
Yeah, this used to be the case (years ago) in the UK too. But now days, most card readers no longer have magstripe readers on them. The chip is the backup now in case contactless fails!
Or just drag the length of the pen over the paper while card is underneath. Repeat a couple of times to get a good imprint while making sure to keep paper/card alignment
On at least one of my cards magstripe is officially considered a legacy feature, I have to explicitly request that it's enabled if I'm travelling to a place likely to make use of magstripe payments, and it will only remain enabled for one or two weeks.
I had no idea if the magnetic stripe on my (australian) credit card worked until a recent trip to the USA. I’ve had that card for years and I don’t think I’ve ever swiped it before. Australian POS terminals won’t let you use the magnetic strip on a card when chip & pin is available. Even inserting your card seems old fashioned now - PayPass (contactless payment) is by far the most common way to pay in australia.
Each year there seems to be fewer reasons to carry a wallet around. Cash? Killed by covid. Card? Apple Pay. Drivers licence? There’s an app for that. It won’t be long before wallets are entirely useless.
I'm far more likely to have my wallet on me than my phone. Credit cards have infinite battery life, 100% waterproofing, no real-time tracking/spying and low to no cost to lose. Cash trades out the low cost to lose for anonymity.
Yes. They sell wallets with Faraday cages. I have been so far able to push off contactless cards, so I just assumed that other people who care about avoiding realtime tracking also insist on chip only.
Just don't assume that's to do you any favors - credit card fraud is 100% on them, the removal of features is to minimize fraud and if it's a feature you still occasionally need it's being done at your expense.
The magnetic stripe is basically phased out in Australia. Sometimes readers let you swipe if the chip doesn’t read after the second try, but the terminals actually don’t let you swipe otherwise and tell you to insert the card if you try!
It’s been like this for several years now - and tap to pay has basically been the default (for purchases under $100) for even longer.
I rented a bicycle in Florida a few days ago where the merchant took an imprint of my card (yeah, in February 2022). I'm not even sure how that can possibly be cheaper than one of those Square devices at this point.
It's probably trivial to other sources of plastic pollution. Most people get what, maybe one new credit card and one new debit card every 4-5 years? By volume it's nothing compared to the average person's consumption of single-use plastics like packaging, etc.
I studied abroad in France in 2012--at this time, all European card readers had been chip-based for quite a while and my US credit card didn't have one. I couldn't figure out how to use them and many store clerks had no idea what to do with my magnetic-strip credit 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.
..just dont go to Germany. We are not very advanced in that regard.
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.
Since I'm dreading the coming of a cashless society, I'm really rooting for the German to push back against it as long as they can so that I can keep using notes and coins in euros.
I always found that so weird! The Exportweltmeister, producing some of the most advanced equipment... and in many places you can't pay with a card at all. Why do you think it is?
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.
We Germans seem to love our cold hard cash, so the incentive to get a card reader is lower. There are even automatic coin counting machines in some self-checkout desks...
It has gotten much better in the pandemic. I pay at the bakery etc with cards. Not sure when I last paid enything with cash. Only caveat is that "cards" not always means Visa/MC/AmEx, but can mean Girocard only. If that is the case (and I'd just ask) then you as a non German will have to pay cash.
We in The Netherlands are one of the most cashless societies in Europe. We mostly pay with our mobiles or contactless with banking cards. We even are "going Dutch" sharing our bills with what we call a Tikkie: One person pays the bill and then we send over instant messaging our payment request for money which can be payed directly with one click and authentication in banking app.
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.
For Americans visiting the Netherlands one word of caution: many of the pay terminals (especially the parking ones) do not seem to like U.S. cards, and even some the vendors from Europe. When we were on vacation there a few years ago it was a roulette game to figure out if parking meters would take my card or that of my father in law (from Hungary).
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.
Most shops in the Netherlands work with maestro of mastercard and vpay of Visa. It is directly linked to our bank credit and has low transaction fees. Maestro and vpay is accepted all over the world. We work directly with IBAN numbers and not with credit card types like mostly in the world.
Normal Mastercard/visa credit don’t work here since shops have to pay way higher transaction fees while almost nobody uses them.
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 it erodes the position of EU banks in favor of Visa and Mastercard. I have no problem with them facilitating the tech, but I do have a problem with them usurping the position of the banks. The EU is already too dependent on the United States in this manner, no need to make it worse.
For Canadians - they've got no issue with almost all of our cards. It's just the American ones that run into issues, so your chip & pin and tap features will work splendidly abroad.
Can’t speak for other countries, but in France and Northern Italy this is the same: contactless cards everywhere. I live in France and --I have to check my banking app to check this because I don’t remember-- the last time I went to a cash machine was almost one year ago.
I'm in the US and the only time I can remember going to an ATM in the past 5 years is because farmers markets sometimes give you discounts > credit card rewards for cash and weed shops cannot use banks so you have to pay cash.
IMO farmers markets would disappear if they stopped using cash. It's basically synonym for tax avoidance sprinkled with some fraudulent claims how your honey cures everything.
I totally agree farmers markets are all about tax avoidance. They would charge me the flat dollar amount for cash but then add in the tax when I used a card. No way they are paying taxes on that cash transaction.
I've lived in France since September, and I think I've used cash... once? You can live entirely off using your phone/credit card to pay these days (if you don't frequent "cash-only" shops).
worth mentioning that this seems a problem limited to the US. Even in Canada, the smallest of towns will have contactless payment. Many Canadians don't really use cash because interac/credit cards have all supported tap to pay for over a decade now.
A lot of POS's support contactless payments, but they were kind of flaky for the first two years, and...oddly slow.
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.
> A lot of POS's support contactless payments, but they were kind of flaky for the first two years
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.
> Fred Meyers here in WA still doesn't support contactless payments (QFC, owned by the same company, does, however)
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.
In the Seattle area, Fred Myer is the only place I can’t use NFC payments, for the last 3 or 4 years. Target has them, though sometimes their COVID plastic on the terminals interferes with it.
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.
> People will still be talking about how the US doesn't have contactless payments another five years from now. It's an inexpensive way to feel good.
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.
I've only just gotten used to the slide-it-in-the-slot kind. Whatever that's called. The thing that's replacing the magnetic stripes, more or less.
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've only just gotten used to the slide-it-in-the-slot kind.
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).
> 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.
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.
You can often scan your phone/card much sooner than when you're presented with your total. I tap my watch at the grocery store as soon as I'm finished loading up the belt.
Whenever "your transaction" begins at the register could be when you're eligible to present your payment to the terminal.
You should see the 'contactless' symbol (looks like a sideways wifi logo) if your card supports it.
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.
my point is that contactless and chip-cards have been around for so long outside the US that magnetic stripes are the oddity. Even the smallest of places with electronic payments will support either chip cards or contactless tap or often both. Near the US border in Canada, many shops have machines that read magnetic stripes. These machines cater almost exclusively to American travellers.
And yet, I've had contactless rejected (even, we want a signature) as recently as 2018, at least. In major metro in California - let alone gas-station-in-rural-Georgia type places.
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.
In Turkey you can move around almost cashless now. Taxis started to accept cards in droves due to the pandemic and some municipalities are integrating VISA/Master infra to the mass transport, so you can just travel with your card.
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.
Same in the US. I virtually never use cash. The only real problem I run into is the occasional "open bar"--drinks are free but there's still an etiquette that you should leave a tip which generally means cash.
Is there a "tip with venmo" poster displayed or do you have to ask the bartender their venmo account name? I've never seen this before, but agreed that it's rare.
They are required for the CC transaction, this adds an additional player that should not be necessary. In civilized countries they have direct bank to bank transfers.
> In civilized countries they have direct bank to bank transfers
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.
No argument from me here. I would like to see better financial infrastructure. Specifically the idea that VISA is permitted to collect a 4% sales tax on virtually everything is a real bummer.
Come to think of it, perhaps I was thinking that since most folks would rather have/trust a credit card, an additional path is just that, somewhat redundant.
Fee-less and effectively instant?
That's the state we are at, now, though it doesn't work for all banks due to the separate clearing system for instant transfers. Normal transfers just take a bank day delay if you're unlucky.
Oh sure, that instant effect is more important for transactions where you don't feel like waiting for it clearing before getting the "reward". Say, being able to buy at an online shop before noon to get it shipped the same day, without any credit history or such required.
If I understand you correctly, we have those here in the States as well, but the problem is you're not using your CC in the first place (in the "open bar" scenario) so you never actually use the terminals.
Can't speak for other countries, but at least here in the Netherlands, chip based cards are still the main type of card, though most of these cards support contactless payment as well. Almost all PoSes also support Apple/Google pay too which is actually pretty convenient. However, I think many (supermarket) PoSes also support magnetic - they appear to have 2 card slots on them.
For france:
contactless on phone should be ok with widely used card providers (VISA)
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.
Haven’t used cash since the pandemic started in the UK. Covid encouraged even market traders and street food vendors to move to contactless payments - which were just about the final holdouts.
Also a kiwi (although living in UK) I've used contactless since it was first available in NZ (ages ago) but when I returned late 2019 I found that contactless was no longer accepted at certain places, like liquor stores. Too many munters nicking cards to buy booze with I guess.
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.
Same, but it's largely been that way since the early 90s.
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 tend to not carry a card anymore, just my phone (Romania). I don't remember the last time I went to a shop that didn't accept card. Everyone who accepts cards accepts contactless.
The reverse problem is also true. As a Brit traveling in the US I was dumbfounded when a payment terminal asked for my zip code...of course i didn't have one and my card was rejected.
At least in the UK, the increase in the contactless limit is accompanied by an increase in the frequency at which you're asked to confirm your card using chip+pin.
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.
While on our first pandemic vacation about three months back I had to acquire local currency and briefly froze in front of the ATM as it'd been over a year and a half since I'd entered that PIN anywhere. I had to mentally cycle through a few I've used over the years until I remembered the current one.
In Italy RFID payments have been a thing since 1989
Unfortunately this is one of those cases where being among early adopters wasn't an advantage, in many areas of Italy cash is still the only viable payment method.
As an Italian I can't disagree, cabs not accepting credit cards infuriate me evrytime, but there's also a strong cultural resistance to change here.
Also friction plays a part, Italy is the second oldest country in the World on average.
My mom uses electronic payments, but I haven't been able to teach her how to pay online or "tap to pay" no matter how hard I tried.
I won't even start to talk about my dad, who doesn't even own a smartphone or a mobile phone before the smart ones existed.
They prefer to go to the ATM and pay cash, their lifestyle is very far from globalized even though they are strongly against tax evasion and always ask for their receipt.
Ironically I've know about Telepass because my parents have been using it for as long as I can remember.
My guess is that they trust Telepass because it's backed by a (former) public institution, Autostrade, but they don't trust mobile phone manufacturers or payment processor companies as much.
I used this payment processor in utah in the early 2010s at Jamba Juices and a few other random places. It was pretty sweet but its name was Isis and that was right around the time Isis started becoming big and I believe they ended up dying off.
Typically, when I see a company changing names, I tend to think they've fucked up something so badly in the past that they hope a name change will remove that stinnk. When you see a name change like this, you're like "yup, good move. hope you did it fast enough!"
Avoiding the Isis name was even enough to change the story line for the animated show Archer.
When I visited Australia in 2015, I was really impressed with the ubiquity and speed of TAP to pay. We aren't quite their in the USA yet, but I do 90% of my payments outside using my Apple watch (with a bit of a lag that I didn't see in Aus). At least we aren't stuck using QR codes.
2011 was when I saw country McDonalds adopt contactless in Australia. From then it was a pretty quick adoption for it to be ubiquitous.
I'm currently on a trip back to Australia and I forgot my wallet (!!), but it's fine because I just use Apple Pay everywhere. It's never once been a problem.
That’s not at all comparable since you’re not really paying. By that logic we’ve had contactless payments for hundreds of years in the form of opening a tab at a merchant.
You're not actually initiating a transfer of money. Sure, it feels like that but in reality they're just storing your CC info and debiting you either in advance (like gas) or settling up (like hotels). You have to have a prior relationship with the company handling your account and figure out a secondary out-of-band payment flow. The fob doesn't really add anything except as a holder of your account id.
The only thing they have in common is the physical action of "boop boop" at a terminal or scanner.
It's more like a contactless gift card: since you can't use your change for purchasing something different, the payment is in the purchase of the gift card.
I distinctly remember, over ten years ago, paying with PayPal at a restaurant in Austin. That's why I have a profile pic on PayPal. The waitress requested I take one as it was the biometric ID method used.
I'm pretty sure it was a tap to pay with the app. I can't remember if the other device was also iOS. It was definitely not the kludgy QR codes like it is now.
I thought it was so cool, but it never caught on. I read a while later that PayPal was licensing that tech and let the license expire.
If Apple wouldn't have effectively crippler innovation by not providing NFC (and later one locking it down) we probably would have contact less payment and many other similar services by now everywhere.
I know of multiple pilot projects and startups which where basically killed (or majorly revamped) because just supporting Android wasn't viable and Apples not showing any intention to support NFC.
The fact that the NFC we have now is missing a major feature of original NFC isn't helping either (the ability to act as a NFC card if the device it's embedded in is powered of/out of battery).
Thanks, I was actually pretty confused by this at first glance.
As a non-Apple-user I've never personally used the feature, but I still thought that stuff like Tap to Pay was a somewhat large selling point for the Apple Watch. So for a second I wondered if I had just been drastically misunderstanding how that worked for a long time and had somehow never actually checked/verified that iPhones/Watch could do that.
I use it nearly every day and definitely for almost every purchase I make. I no longer carry around a wallet now that digital IDs are a thing and have only had 1 situation in the last 6 months where I needed a physical card because they had TTP disabled on their terminal.
That's impressive, I want to live where you do! I swear there's one major retailer by me (never remember until I'm at the terminal) that still has tap to pay disabled. Catches me every time.
I'm down to just a 4 card MagSafe wallet (credit/debit/ID/car key), but I'd love to get to just a phone. Sadly I'm sure Wisconsin will be another 5-10 years before supporting digital ID.
I'm down to just my backup card in my MagSafe wallet. I'll occasionally keep my ID in there too but only if I know I'm going out to a place that needs to check a physical ID. If I could, I would do without the wallet completely.
A few years ago I was surprised that in some states it is illegal to go out in public without an ID in the event a cop stops you and asks for ID. Seems completely contrary to everything we were taught growing up.
I am not a lawyer, but I am fairly certain that that isn't true (if you're not driving).
Many states require that you identify yourself (presumably full name and DOB at a minimum) to an officer upon request, but I don't think that means you have to carry the physical card, just provide your identity (which can be done verbally).
In my area most restaurants with table service don't have an easy way to do tap-to-pay (a few chains have something at the table for you to pay at that supports it). Also two of my most common retailers do not (Kroger and Home Depot). Very few gas stations support it, though the one closest to me recently added it.
Yep, Kroger and Home Depot are the biggest stores I've been to recently that don't take tap-to-pay, but there are some other national chains.
Also recently: my neighborhood florist, doughnut shop, parking garage, and hamburger stand don't take tap-to-pay. I've never been to a gas pump that does, though they all have the logo for it on the front. Every time I've inquired, the people inside say it's not enabled.
Record stores are about 50%. The one I went to most recently, I had to show them how to do it.
But interestingly, my shoeshine guy does take tap-to-pay.
I always keep at least one backup card and some cash in my wallet. I recently had to make an emergency trip to the Walgreens at 5am, and its credit card/tap system was down. It was cash-only for about a week. Glad I had cash backup so my family member's health wasn't held hostage by a technology glitch.
In the UK, they bring the card reader to your table and the transaction completes wirelessly. If you want to add a tip, you type the amount into the reader before you tap.
Increasingly public transport supports contactless instead of tickets or proprietary NFC systems - notably the whole of London supports contactless and I've not used an Oyster card in years now.
I've also not seen a card reader that doesn't support contactless since at least 2015, possibly longer. I'm not sure, but based on how quickly contactless rolled out from 2007, I suspect they'd been adding support to the hardware a well before it was enabled.
I know everyone says it but USA really needs to do better. It doesn't make sense that this is so uniquely difficult to rollout there.
Many gas stations are still magnetic strip only. It was the majority as of a couple of years ago, but it's shifting quickly. That said, I still very frequently encounter gas stations that don't accept chip or tap, only strip.
I can pay with contactless / Apple Pay almost everywhere, except the largest grocer chain in Texas - H-E-B - doesn't support it. Unfortunately, this is where I make most of my purchases, so I end up using Apple Pay on infrequent other shopping trips.
Home Depot is exactly the one that I wasn't able to use it at. I don't go there too often, though, so it's one of those things where I plan for it when I need to go now.
I honestly don't see what's so revolutionary about this. Why would anyone shell out multiple hundreds of € when a device that accepts payments can be purchased for a fraction of the iPhone price?
E.g the most expensive device here [1] is only 120 €, and it can also print the bill. The cheapest that does the job is a mere 20 €.
Because a lot of people, going by the sales numbers, have iPhones? It’s more for very small businesses, who just need a quick and easy way to take card payments. Larger outfits will naturally invest in “real” PoS devices.
I can’t speak for America but in the U.K. there have been terminals that do this that small independent businesses have used for years. They connect to your phone too and work with both Android and iOS. You see taxis, street food sellers and all sorts using them. They also cheap and yet still look a hell of a lot more professional than this thing does.
It is the same in the states with Square (among others), but the ease of “I have to do nothing” is nonetheless extremely alluring to the most adhoc of businesses.
They're fairly common in the U.S., as far as 2015 that I remember, except they're often flaky, rely on Bluetooth and have their own battery, which many means merchants who don't use them that often would switch them off to save the battery. And with your iPhone, it's likely you have it charged and turned on at all times.
Sorry, by ”this thing”, do you mean an iPhone? That it looks less professional to use a phone than a dedicated card reader? I can see it, I was just genuinely a little thrown by the wording.
Sorry yeah. I don’t know why I shouldn’t trust tapping on someone’s iPhone but it doesn’t scream “professional shop” in the same way that those card readers do. Even though those card readers are very cheap and ostensibly work the same, they just feel more “professional”.
Plenty of sole trader workmen and taxi drivers and the like have the square terminal that, I just checked, costs €20. €20 to take payments from 100% of your customers rather than the 30-40% market share iPhone has here seems like a no brainer to me.
I think you misunderstand the product. You can take payments from any contactless credential. That means credit cards, Apple Pay, google pay, Samsung pay, and so forth.
> At checkout, the merchant will simply prompt the customer to hold their iPhone or Apple Watch to pay with Apple Pay, their contactless credit or debit card, or other digital wallet near the merchant’s iPhone, and the payment will be securely completed using NFC technology
The language is a bit verbose, but does look like it supports standard NFC based contactless also.
American merchants doing low customer volume (e.g. small shop, cafe, restaurant) are usually locked into using something like a terminal from First Data (~$150-200 USD minimum for the most basic device) and something in the ballpark of 2.2% to 2.7% in fees for every transaction. People paying the lower rate are doing over $50k per month in transaction volume.
Compare that to competitors in the space like Square, which costs ~$300 USD and charges ~2.6% plus a flat 10 cents per transaction.
If you're not doing over $50k in volume per month and already have an iPhone...you might as well just use the Square app and take NFC payments on your phone instead of investing in the reader (assuming you're operating in a space where consumers will readily have NFC payments ready).
I suspect the real benefit is situations where the seller comes to you. A cafe can have an additional piece of equipment sitting on the counter for taking payments, but if you're a handyman or something, going to someone's house, being able to take payment on the spot using the phone already in your phone seems like a valuable convenience.
The basic square hardware is about 1/5 the price you listed, but I don't think it's the price, but the effort – filling a form in the app vs waiting for a package to arrive in the mail, and setting up some extra hardware (What I must wonder is what Apple charges Square for this feature)
It has probably been 5 years since I've encountered the most basic Square reader in the wild (the $10 magstripe one), and I can think of a single time in the past two years I've encountered the cheap one you're referencing (which is why I forgot about it in the first place).
Yeah, those. I basically never see them anymore. There was a short time where they seemed pretty common, but I honestly only remember seeing one once in the last two years, at a farmers' market booth. All the vendors I frequent that used to use that have either upgraded to the full-function $300 Square terminal, or moved to using other solutions like Toast or Clover.
Might be big for bigger vendors too. I know Oracle extorts at least some merchants at least a few hundred dollars per year per credit card terminal for the privilege (“interface license fee” or some BS) of being able to use it. The more some of these legacy middlemen get taken out of the picture, the better.
The POS terminals for BlueMercury (a national cosmetics chain) are iPad Airs with a tap-to-pay reader bolted on them. This would remove that bulk, expense, and potential point of failure.
You haven’t seen businesses using things like Square on an iPad or iPhone as a pseudo POS system? Square even has a contactless reader on the Apple Store. Presumably, now businesses do not have to use those third parties anymore.
€120 for a CC processing terminal with the fees for setup? Doubt it. That’s the price of that little printer alone. Else they’ll be paying them back in processing fees.
AFAIK and from my experience in many counteris PoS terminals are pretty expensive + they require you to have a constant cash flow otherwise they take it from you.
Because you still usually need a mobile device the modern cashless till today is an iPad with an NFC dongle to take payments now you can skip the dongle..
The UX of an iPhone is much better than most legacy card terminals and as others have said, many people already own one and thus wouldn't need anything other than installing an app.
Think of all the e waste and logistics saved by avoiding third party payment hardware that would’ve previously been needed to support accepting contactless payments.
I remember throwing plastic bottles off a river bridge with my class in 3rd grade. While it's true that the river connected to an ocean some 400km downstream, I doubt they made it further than the next best river bank.
I sincerely hope that since then schools have stopped encouraging children to throw plastic in waterways like this.
I'm not sure if that has ever been a thing in the US but here in Germany you can drop off 35mm film at most drug stores for less than 5€. They even give you a 9×13cm printout.
This has been a thing for a long time, I remember going with my mom to the drugstore after a holiday to develop a bunch of them. I bet they've thought of axing this for cost saving in the past but are now more than happy that they didn't do so with the resurgence of film photography over the past years.
In the past you could get film processed at most drug stores and many larger supermarket style stores like Walmart, Meijer, etc. Many times you could get the entire process done in one hour or less.
Now I cannot recall the last time I saw an in-store film processing setup. From a quick google search, there are a couple of specialty shops, but the pharmacies mention 7-10 day turn arounds, so they're sending it offsite somewhere.
I remember those machines being above the size of 4 office photocopy/print machines- it’s pretty amazing thinking of all the mechanical internals that must be in those things.
I’ve sometimes wondered what became of them all, were they able to recycle some of the materials, or are they in a bunch of landfills?
It was like that about 10-15 years ago in the US. But in the last decade as analog film died all of the drug stores got rid of their photo developing equipment--it took up a lot of room, required chemicals and training to use, etc.
This may be off-topic but over the years of working in a shared office with 3 others, I learned to distinguish whether they were coding, writing on their thesis, or just browsing.
You can check for your self in the username of your parent comment, which includes a racial slur. This specific slur is common in Hungary so make of that what you will when judging the amount of bias in that comment.
On a side note I am not sure if that username complies with HN TOS.
The entire point of the EU is to form consensus for the betterment of Europe. Different opinions are important but create friction. Agreement, yes sometimes against ones own opinion, is necessary to strengthen the EU. Individuals in an alliance that regularly strive against agreements and consensus are hurting the alliance, hurting Europe.
If consensus is apparently not desired we can go back to the European patchwork where the rules change significantly every 100km and doing trade is 10x harder.
Sadly the UK took that hit for the others, making the disadvantages of leaving very clear. So these guys will continue staying in the tent while pissing inside of it, sadly. But sooner or later a reckoning will happen, either in Europe or in their own countries.
While I agree that "the vast majority of content is pure garbage", I have to make an argument that a non-negligible portion of the site delivers high-quality educational videos with excellent research. The curiosity-seeking part of my brain is subject to being very easy to get hooked on this.
Yes, they will get the chance to argue in front of a higher court. But they can't skip the lower court.
If I understand it correctly (Quad9 is a bit sparse on details here), this was a decision to uphold the original injunction. This decision is open to immediate appeal to a higher court, but Quad9 will have to show that there's an especially high urgency for that. Otherwise they will have to wait for the judgment in the principal case.
