In that sense, wouldn't it be just as easy to insert the card into a POS device and supply the PIN?

The point of contactless is to make it less bother to use cards. One of the tradeoffs for that is reducing the security – it's sort of a necessary condition. Losses are limited to maybe £150 in the UK (that's 5 transactions at the maximum of £30) without further authentication, and it's virtually certain that the card provider will refund these transactions too if your card is used without authorisation.

It's significantly easier to simply touch the card than to have to insert it into a device that provides a keypad, and then type a PIN into said keypad. The keypad approach is safer though, and I'd prefer that for lots of situations, but there's no situation in which I'd want to be able to have money leave my card without me at least touching the damn thing to activate it.

There is no "point" to Contactless if you have to take the card out and touch it. At that point you may as well swipe it.

Contactless as an idea is probably ill-conceived though.

I think the "point" of contactless is to make the transactions quicker. Where it used to (in the UK) take 30 seconds to put your card in the chip and pin machine, enter your pin number and wait for the transaction to be confirmed, now its literally 3 seconds. Over the course of a year that is a massive time saving for the retailer and so a cost saving (less staff).

With chip and pin the customer was liable for all transactions when their pin number was used. It was your responsibility to ensure it wasn't exposed.

Now with contactless there is no risk to the customer, the bank/retailer takes on the full risk of fraud for contactless payments. You will not be out of pocket for a fraudulent contactless transaction. This is why contactless transaction are limited to £30 (initially was £20), it limits the bank/retailers potential exposure to contactless fraud, its also handily set to just about the average card transaction in the UK.

Interesting. In the US most businesses use magnetic stripe readers which take ~1 second from swipe to approval.

You can use swipe in some places in the UK, but then you have to wait for the receipt to print, the cashier to find a pen, you have to sign it and the cashier has to verify it, click on the terminal that they did, and get a final receipt printed. It's even more hassle than typing in a pin.

But then you usually have to sign as well. Chip and PIN transactions don't need a signature, and in my experience the total time to swipe+sign is about the same same as insert+pin.

Contactless payments don't need a signature or a PIN, so they're significantly quicker.

I rarely if ever have to sign for a purchase under $25.

We stopped using that for lack of security, plus I think signing the receipt (and carbon copy) is time consuming, right?

I don't do much legacy brick and mortar CC shopping anymore, but it seems completely random at Home Depot and Target if they want my signature or not. Maybe after X transactions in the last Y days they no longer need a sig. With a possible side dish of Z percent or lower of transactions are fraudulent from this store.

Its very, very convenient. More-so than cash.

1. I don't have to carry cash 2. I don't have to go to the bank to get cash 3. I don't have to count the cash when paying 4. No change to worry about. 5. Transaction logs via bank statement

The downside that this (OP) problem illustrates does need sorting and I was very sceptical of contactless before I used it, but its quite nice.

Most credit and debit cards are not contactless and can only be read when inserted into a reader. Why not use one of those?

These contactless cards can also be used on TFL (Transport for London) Underground entry points, directly debiting your bank account. There is no mechanical degradation associated with using a contactless card whereas in my experience swiping the mag-stripe is problematic.

However as many have pointed out, there are potentially a boat load of skimming issues.

In the UK, most new debit cards at least do have contactless payment. I'm not sure about credit cards, but it's probably the same.