Cards are waterproof, and don't require being charged.
Obviously 90% of the time a phone could be used (though I don't agree it's faster than credit card tap, roughly the same speed) and a card can be used as backup, but it makes ditching a credit card completely not really an option.
If your social circle is anything like mine, it's not some person, it's always one, as in a single person who disproportionately is incapable of maintaining their phone. For the majority of people they're very reliable devices, so this is less "everyone will be inconvenienced sometimes" and more "a few people will be inconvenienced a lot". I recognize that it's still an issue, but those people can keep using cards while the rest of us benefit from tap-to-pay being the preferable option a majority of the time.
I thought "maybe the mayor is speaking to the media" and walked over. Turns out the crowd was people charging their phone from the truck. CNN generously left the truck running there for a couple of days.
If you lose your phone you just fall back to the physical card that you presumably have in your wallet somewhere.
If your phone is almost out of juice, you can order an Uber. But if your battery is flat, you can always ask the cabby if they take cards (or just withdraw cash using your card if you're in a city where most of the cabs don't).
Man, I love Uber. Or at least the idea.
Fight the power! Stick it to the man!
If one believes that a proposed-but-currently-illegal behavior is beneficial to society, the technically correct way to go about rectifying the situation is to discuss with your local democratic representatives, who can take the issue back to the legislative chamber and work to correct the law. Admittedly, that's pretty impractical at this point.
The taxi driver is just trying to reduce his costs; he could allow riders to negotiate cheaper prices, benefiting everyone.
Given credit card companies have legal means to pay less percentage tax on much more income than the cab driver and suck money out of taxpayers' pockets in many other ways, I'd offer that screwing over the credit card company might benefit the rest of taxpayers more than the cabbie paying tax does.
I really like cash.
It can be stolen easily. You have to go somewhere to get more of it. You have to make change. It doesn't allow you to automatically track your purchases. You can't get it back from a seller if you are sold fraudulent goods.
Edit: Thought about getting the $50 version, but I'm not quite that frugal.
Second Edit: You probably need NFC for this huh? Drat.
Wow. Not a comment about you in particular, but about the industry in general. I did a quick search and found this: http://bluproducts.com/android-phones
Really? 66 different phones? Is this entire industry, except for Apple, run by imbeciles? Not that I'm in the target demographic, but I only have a relatively few years left on this earth. I don't want to spend half of them just figuring out the differences between Android phones!
Hasn't the rest of the world learned anything from St. Steven?
Out of curiosity, I went to find out how many variants Apple is currently selling[1] (model, color, storage). I counted 42 distinct combinations you could possibly choose! I guess not even Apple learned from 'St. Steven', or he was wrong.
Removing the color axis whittles down the model/memory combination to a more manageable 12 options - but the point remains.
BLU is a usually-cheap phone brand, with handsets starting around 60USD.
The magnet isn't damaging the phone — at least not at field strengths likely to be encountered in everyday life. Removing the magnetic field should immediately turn the screen back on.
There were a couple of times when Samsung Pay blocked all payments until an update was applied and the change log had nothing to do with payment functionality but with other useless & unrelated stuff like "better notifications" "better deals". NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING about a security issue, a flaw or a hole that was being used to steal money.
I havent had too many issues with Android Pay but still its the same issue ... instead of a simple swipe and go, and my ability to use my money in anyway I want and I am not at the mercy of an app developer who is acting as a gatekeeper to access my money so he/she/it can control what I need on my phone / my device to use my money whenever I want so they can push their agenda that has nothing to do with me using my money. no thanks.
thats not even including the additional cut the app provider takes and increases my price effectively. I'd rather pay one middleman.
Credit Cards dont need to be "fixed" or "solved". As a customer, its easy to use, widely accepted and my risks are covered 100% by the issuer. I cant say the same for phone payment methods.
I've had cards compromised probably a dozen times (most in the forms of "mass compromise," where the bank shuts down my account and sends me a new card even though there were no fraudulent charges on my specific account). I'm glad I didn't have to pay any cash, but it has cost me a lot nonetheless.
If the underlying credit card number is compromised, just change that and leave the virtual in place.
My daily card has been compromised a few times—Chase just overnighted me a replacement and that was it.
As a customer, you are paying more for products because credit cards are broken: retailers are passing on fraud-related expenses to you. You are paying for the inefficiencies in the system, even if the costs seem hidden.
http://www.howtogeek.com/241012/safetynet-explained-why-andr... has an explainer, and a link to more technical information.
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/surcharge-c...
In the UK nearly all cards can be used for contactless payments below a fixed amount (£ 30 at the moment).
Additional security (inconvenience) only kicks in on higher price purchases.
Additionally, there is no time delay for contactless, and chip and pin is extremely fast too.
Contactless is far faster than even unlocking your phone (even if you use a fingerprint unlock), and can usually be done concurrent to the cashier putting your item in a bag or reaching to pass it to you... it is essentially frictionless.
This all works so well I find myself doing something I never though I would... I've abandoned cash. Contactless payments are that good, and fast, and work at the end of the day when my phone is out of battery, and works for every one of my daily casual purchases (travel, food, a book, some toiletries, some groceries, etc).
During a recent trip to the US, they had to swipe my card and make me sign a piece of paper (which I gleefully sign with an "X" as if I were illiterate). It felt so backwards.
In pretty much every other country I've visited, you have to do the whole process serially after the total is done, which is quite slow.
By comparison banks in the US use the debit card & ACH system which has many issues compared to credit cards and European payment systems.
They've been quite good at this — Norway has had chip and pin since the early 2000s, and contactless payments (using NFC in ordinary cards, not phones) have existed for a few years now. Money transfers are also completely effortless; all you need is the other person's bank account number.
For consumers, the main hurdle remaining is the speed of transfers between banks. They only perform transfers in bulk twice a day (and for years they only did it once a day).
Just swiping the card, however, also works just fine and I now use it everywhere again because I can't be bothered to remember and type in yet another passcode. Just more friction in the process.
So yes, the chip rollout here in the states is a giant clusterfuck for the time being. It will get better soon, once the hodgepodge of banks and hardware vendors get everything straightened out.
[1] http://www.emv-connection.com/downloads/2015/05/EMF-Liabilit...
For a grocery store <1% per transaction and 3% per transaction is a pretty huge difference, one of my local stores that only takes debit cards still doesn't support chip cards because of the madness with the US Common Debit AID preventing them from enabling the EMV support on their terminals.
That is for debit, which is an entirely different thing than credit.
There are no US banks that implement Chip & PIN. Heck, it's nearly impossible to get a Chip & PIN capable card for travel if you have a US issuing bank.
Swipe support will in theory eventually be disabled (e.g. authorizations declined by your issuing bank) at some point in the future when Chip & Signature is being rolled out.
If you're typing your PIN code into a terminal in the US, you are using debit though.
Not entirely, but your last sentence is true. Some issuers do PIN credit cards. I have one from First Tech Federal Credit Union that uses PIN and touts it as a benefit. When I used it in Europe, it worked exactly as expected and prompted for my PIN just like in the States. There are a handful of smaller issuers that also do PIN primary (mostly credit unions but at least one Florida bank with a card catering to Cuban trade does) and a few more that have PINs but the PIN is secondary so it isn't asked for unless the terminal's configuration insists on it.
Frankly, I'm baffles by these claims that US cards don't work with chip and pin because so far, if I use the chip, I have been required to use the pin.
I also have a corporate amex with a pin set up, but I've never used it.
Not true - BarclayCard Arrival/Arrival+ do. However, they prioritize signature first. They can be used at automated kiosks that require PINs, though.
Many airlines transmit level 3 purchase data as part of the credit card transaction, which will contain your complete itinerary -- which can be fed into the bank's risk system.
This sounds really interesting.
I've had chip cards in the U.S. for a couple years, but I've never seen someone use a contactless payment card here. Even tap to pay with phone is very uncommon.
My anecdotal experience has shown this to be an extreme pain in some cases for both consumers and retailers. Any sort of business with frequent CC payments and high volume sees their POS wait time explode.
Two personal examples:
Attended a cinema, where they had to delay the movie time due to long CC processing times. Bought food at a takeout place, with clear signs instructions (to avoid) and apologies for the delays caused by chip readers.
Chip and pin definitely would definitely be too slow for this. The barriers have to be fast enough to process huge numbers of people at peak times.
Contactless has eliminated all the usual queuing for tickets and/or prepay card topups - except for tourists.
However, customers hated it because it felt like it took longer. They would be done with their transaction, done paying, then have to way 10-20 seconds for their receipt to finish printing. So they'd be standing there just waiting to leave with nothing to do. The company had us change it back to printing each line as it was entered into the computer.
But the modern thermal receipt printers are pretty fast (the old dot-matrix ones weren't). Epson has one that does 350 mm/sec (13.75 inches per second). So as long as you aren't shopping at CVS with their infamously long receipts, it's not too long of a wait.
This is a sign of their incompetence. Period
The whole rest of the world uses this without a problem.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/04/13/474135422/episo...
Per parent, this could also be an internet issue. If the POS is processing with a delay, the employee has little control and blaming "incompetence" is ludicrous.
Having first hand experience with dealing with impatient customers because the POS is running slow creates a feeling of entitlement (on the person pointing out how incompetent someone is) and resentment (on the side of the affected employee who is helpless in the situation).
A one-off internet issue is fine. But in this case it seems that there is something systematically broken.
After readying your comment, I went through at least 5 different emotions.
I work in the QSR space and deal with the IT side. The idea that IT department can control the speed of the computer/internet/etc. is shared by both, staff and guests. Regardless if that's the case, your comment, in addition to the parent comment are fascinating.
It seems that regardless of the situation, someone has to take the fault and customers will just blame someone regardless. That's totally appropriate (even if its not, doesn't really matter as this is a perception > reality).
Just for that insight, I would up vote your comment twice, if I could.
Not really true. The rest of the world has had it and moved on, and this is a main reason why.
In my country at least, we're now on to tap-to-pay credit and debit cards in recent years, which is faster than the old school swipe and sign and much faster than the chip.
1. cashier done scanning items 2. person swipes card since reader has a slot to do that on the right side and that's what they usually do 3. machine beeps or displays an error or does nothing 4. cashier has to explain to insert the card 5. person fumbles with card, eventually getting it into slot 6. sometimes people just push it in and pull it out or otherwise don't leave it in long enough since every single POS has a different workflow and dialogue for this, and this error condition requires re-starting the process (GOTO 3) 7. Waiting 3-10+ seconds 8. Sign 9. Hit yes or accept or I agree 10. Wait another few seconds 11. Remove or forget card. Sometimes the machine beeps, sometimes not 12. Done!
Despite all this hassle, we still didn't get chip and pin that I had been complaining about for years, so if someone steals your physical card, they can still use it until you realize. I'm not really sure how this whole process improves security (does the actual CC number no longer enter the POS at any point?) but consumers here are definitely having some growing pains with the new system and the current state of supporting both old and new systems.
Whose incompetence? The cinema? They bought a turn-key, off-the-shelf POS package from a vendor. How much control do you think they have over that system? Card processing starts taking a dump, and you would suggest that the minimum-wage cinema worker running the cards do...?
Though your post makes me wonder: do payment providers have SLAs, or do they just say, "you're locked in with our network and hardware, suck it up"?
I feel awkward and foolish with it, since it's ostensibly so simple, but so inconsistent. Add in a watching-water-boil time delay, and it's just a great recipe for social anxiety. One wrong move can jam the works. (Like, I once pulled the card out too early when I heard it beep at a Target and the register had to cancel the order and restart.)
Weird. In Germany, it's usually very, very fast (recently, using my Number26 CC, payment in three seconds including PIN entry, and ten seconds later I got the push notification on my phone).
But that may also very well be because it's rare here to see outdated terminals. Most retail chains change their card terminals every two or three years, because they listen to their customers who actively demand speedy transactions. Oh, and because stores usually don't own the terminals but rent them (cheapest solutions are at < 20€/month and terminal). Downside: CC fees for merchants can range up to 4%, most of it goes to the CC providers.
It mostly seems smaller merchants simply don't switch their acquirer to get cheaper rates and complain about "high costs". FWIW, credit cards are capped at 0.3% interchange (which is what the bank gets), debit cards at 0.2% since last year. Scheme fees for MasterCard/Visa are peanuts and even AmEx doesn't cost 4%.
For example see https://www.cashforless.de.
Visa/MasterCard credit and debit 0.98% German debit (girocard) 0.25%
The only terminals in the US that take the chipped cards are brand new (because the cards themselves are new and the deadline to accept them isn't quite here yet). I don't know why they are so slow, but they are all brand new machines.
For example, the Wawa chain of convenience stores on the East coast are very good at moving people through the registers. Around 10-15s per transaction sustained throughput is common: one or two items, beep beep good day. If someone pays by check or chip, the whole thing grinds to a halt and everyone taps their foot.
This was well before chip-and-pin, they probably did because of the slowness of writing checks.
Though maybe this is all moot with self-checkout since the store doesn't really care that much if it takes you a bit longer to check out. Especially if they can show you ads while you wait.
The chip also enables contactless transactions which is even faster.
The card swipe doesn't use the same reader hardware as the chip reading (well, it is in the device) and there is more processing going on with more round trips to the bank if using the chip. Likely different parts of the software are used both at the reader and the bank as well.
They do have the nifty portable readers, though.
Canada has them, too, and they're great at restaurants. Great for tipping since they just hand you the device at that point with common percentage options on screen (or the option to customize it).
The American experience of server collects your card, comes back with two receipts, mental arithmetic to figure out the tip, write it down on the receipt, hand the receipt back, and server types in the tip amount just seems clunky in comparison.
In general, though, I carry cash for tips since I know those probably won't be taxed.
Always amusing to see confused Americans in Canadian restaurants, though.
But I can tell you that my German card is quite slow in Germany (not as slow as US transaction though) but blazingly fast in Sweden, Denmark, or France.
Apple takes a cut for "tap to pay". No one wants to pay extra middlemen.
> For reasons I don't understand, the credit card makers have spent many years bringing the new chip cards to market, they include much higher technology than ever offered before, yet the payment process takes much longer.
It took years to roll out chip and pin because no one wanted to pay for the new terminals (another expensive cost pushed on to someone). It takes longer to approve a transaction because of the challenge response implemented to reduce fraud.
> I do understand the fees though. The credit card brands and banks have worked themselves, through years of diligent effort, into a business where they can impose a kind of "tax" of 3% on most of the retail economy across the entire US.
This is being driven down by legislation.
Everything has a cost, and someone has to pay it.
MasterCard and Visa do pay Apple a minuscule fee (15¢ per $100.00, and less in Europe), however, it is smaller than the amount they expect to save due to reduced fraud from folks using ApplePay (and Apple apparently has also agreed to split some fraction of any fraud losses with them).
In Europe, the interchange fee (what the retailer's bank pays to the card company) is limited to 0.3% for credit cards and 0.2% for debit cards. This came into effect sometime last year.
Reward programs always have been a bit less pronounced here in Europe and mostly have been reduced after the regulation of interchange fees.
Naw, never mind this is the USA. Free market is all that matters.
With regards to merchant fees, I have actually had some merchants say they would be glad to take a check
As for Apple Pay, it becomes A LOT more compelling if you have an Apple Watch. All of a sudden instead of having to pull your phone out of your pocket you Press the button on the watch, move your wrist in front of the reader, and it's done.
To be fair since I've gotten my watch Apple Pay is in WAY more places so I can use it on a regular basis.
I think Apple Pay would still win over the card for privacy (I'm REALLY tired of getting cards stolen) and speed over the current chip system.
I doubt the security is greater:
* Phones have a far larger attack surface and are regularly exploited.
* Confidentiality is part of security, and I don't want my purchases tied to the rest of my phone data and identity.
Motorolla has the horribly overpriced AME 2000 (ick), and Samsung has the knox platform built standard into most of their stuff (which is very good), but they lack a true HSM. If you're an android user and want a HSM for sensitive data, get one of the Microcrypt SD devices. It is as good as you'll get (and still not as good as an iPhone).
Unique card # per transaction is the holy grail of security.
Your claims of somehow compromising confidentiality are also provably false.
What's the point of saying something is provably false and then completely leaving out any reference to that proof?
There is a reliance on the security of the local device that isn't an issue with cards. Primarily this is more of a social engineering concern anyway, rendering most technical solutions useless.
Agree. However, this does illustrate a point that safety concerns are valid.
Myself, I'm a proponent of mobile payment but I understand the inherited hesitation from some folk about security.
It's enough faster than chip+pin to make a difference. But the weird thing about chip+pin is that it's much slower in NYC than it is in Toronto or elsewhere in Canada. I can see why these mobile-pay systems are gaining ground in the U.S. where chip+pin is poorly supported in the rare places that it's actually supported at all. And I don't see anyone tap-pay'ing with their cards here.
The infrastructure behind the tech makes a big difference for whether there's any room for mobile-pay to actually improve on credit-cards.
That seems to be true, what I can't figure out is why.
The whole Android Pay/Apple Pay thing has been nice from a "more people have the terminal now" thing. But the card's tap function works so well, I can't imagine using my phone.
There is no reason to think that the 2-3% tax is going away anytime soon once you understand the network dynamics. The key element that almost everyone overlooks, even people on HN building alternative payment systems, is that that tax mostly gets refunded to consumers via reward programs. It does not just go into Visa or the banks' coffers. They certainly take a healthy slice of it at scale but they key point is, they have aligned themselves with consumer interests. Reward programs keep consumers loyal to the "high tax" system, because the tax mainly goes to them.
This can be demonstrated very simply by comparing credit and debit usage rates. There is already a "low tax" payment method that has near 100% adoption in every consumer pocket and merchant register. It's called debit cards. They work exactly the same as credit cards at the register -- you can even sign for them (and it's no more expensive than PIN thanks to the Durbin amendment). Yet consumers still widely use credit cards. Why? Because no rewards. It's mostly merchants who would benefit from lower interchange fees, at least in the short run.
So this is why Apple Pay et al did not try to build a lower-fee system. It would have misaligned them with consumers. This might shed some light on why Bitcoin never had much of a chance as an alternative consumer payment method.
I'm curious as to the experience of people taking EMV cards from the US to Europe, is it any faster than in the states on the same terminal hardware?
But to your point I found chip terminal manufactuer that claims to have optimized the communications between the chip and the terminal [2].
[1] http://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Speeds-...
[2] https://cayan.com/insights/emv-doesn-t-have-to-slow-down-the...
NNNNnno. 1) the price on everything is inflated 3% for what amounts to an archaic and insecure way to process transactions 2) It's not opt-in: that is, with few rare cases, I gain nothing, and in fact, must spend more money to not participate and 3) Even if I do participate, all I can hope for is, at best, 1.5% or so cash back. You might say, "Oh, well that's a fee for convenience and security. OK, then what the hell is that fee I pay for the card every year?
It's bullshit. Get rid of it. Make consumer credit illegal. People are too stupid, greedy and short sighted to consume it well.
As for the theory that prices are inflated by interchange, there are two problems with it. One, reward card users don't experience inflation because most of the interchange is refunded to them. Two, when Australia regulated down interchange, it didn't actually result in lower prices.
> what the hell is that fee I pay for the card every year?
Most cards in the U.S. don't have annual fees. The ones that do usually offer enhanced benefits like richer reward programs.
So simply preload the transaction as you're walking to the barrier, then touch your phone on the reader. Usually it is fractionally faster than contactless cards.
Some places require inserting. Some places still use swiping. There's a swipe area and an insert slot. The cashier looks at you like you're new to using credit cards when you don't guess the right method, even though it's different everywhere you go. It's a mess and apparently the chip isn't even a requirement. Screw the chip.
I'm unhappy that stores have been pushing more and more cashier work onto the customer without adopting an industry standard UI for their payment systems.
In Europe, even when being abroad (if that makes a difference), I have never had any issues with delays or payments, it only takes 1-2 seconds.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/04/13/474135422/episo...
Chip & PIN is quite prevalent up here in west coast Canada. Just wondering how our experience differs from yours.
Compared to something like ApplePay where you tap and it's processed in a few seconds or old swipe where it's even faster.
And that's assuming Apple Pay is recognizing your fingerprint or is coming up at all. Don't get me started if you have multiple cards linked to Apple Pay...
For extra oddness, Apple Pay is extremely fast everywhere I've used it except my grocery store. There it takes about 30 seconds. I have no idea why. The device tells me I'm done, but for whatever reason the software on the point-of-sale system doesn't decide that the transaction has been paid for for a surprisingly long amount of time.
This is not possible via the chip which requires synchronous communication with the terminal.
The example it brought up was that because the chip's identity could be verified through local communication with the chip, purchases could be logged at the terminal and synchronized at any point with the payment processor.
Is there something about the US payment processing market that makes that feature unattractive? Are businesses subsidizing more fraud protection than in other countries by making transactions synchronous and hiring more staff?
Sometimes I need to read comments like this to remind me that Hacker News is full of people who live inside the SF tech bubble where this sentence is considered a reasonable idea, and I shouldn't take HN too seriously.
I don't even know how to swipe my phone.
The funny part is that this all works quite well in Canada. The chip and pin systems there are quick and completely painless. Send like the card companies in the US drug their feet for years, and then picked up some substandard contractors for implementations...
I believe Europe has had this chip and pin technology for something like 20 years so we just finally upgraded to 20 year old technology.
For some reason the credit card cabal decided that after all this time that instead giving the US "the chip and pin which would be compatible with the EU system they gave us "chip and pin" which incidentally takes much longer to process a card, and I am almost never asked to actually sing my transaction. You have to ask WTF on all this?
The rational I hear about why the US went with "chip and sign" rather than "chip and pin" is that they feared that US card holders if they have to memorize pin numbers they would likely stop using there other credit cards(lots of people in the US have 3 or 4) and just use the single one they decided to memorize. Memorizing pins was at odd with encouraging maximal credit card use.
-Instead of getting quicker, payments just got slower
-Apple and Google have the credit card companies on to their payment platforms now
-Minimum wage moving toward $15+ an hour means cashiers need to double speed/efficiency
-Interest rates are extremely low, which means cash flowing transactions is cheaper for any party
The payment terminal is already being leapfrogged at Starbucks with mobile ordering. Retail stores could require identification and payment method in order to enter the store, and then bill you as you walk out using mobile sensors. This wouldn't be any more unusual than needing a membership to get in to Costco. The membership contract could over ride traditional payment transaction rules.
There are tipping points in terms of costs vs lost revenue but I suspect things are going to move away from cash and physical cards really quickly. Like Uber, rather than being a negative, this will be seen as a huge positive by the majority of users.
Until the device that authorizes the payment is owned by me, there's always a great deal of opportunity for chicanery.
Also, not to be discounted is that it's far from free to handle cash. The delay in settling credit card payments + apparently pretty heavy-handed practises around charge backs is probably a bigger problem than ~2% transaction fees are.
[1] https://gendal.me/2014/08/09/a-simple-explanation-of-fees-in...
Yeah they do. To the point that both Visa and MasterCard opposed even introducing chips for years. For that sole reason.
It's one of the main causes of the incredibly long delay the US has seen to their card security.
I don't always carry my phone. A credit card requires no power supply either.
Of course cash is preferable to both.
The chip and whatever cards despite taking 10 or more seconds are still just transferring the secret to the merchant. So once criminals figure out how to make copies they will be no more secure.
Are generally wildly insecure.
The problem is not that a phone is fundamentally better for this stuff, the problem is that you're yet to be provided a card-based alternative that works well.
For transactions under $100, card payments in Australia don't require authorisation (I'm unsure if this is a legal requirement, or if it's just a de-facto standard that most of our banks have adopted). You just wave the card and you're good to go - the payment processes using the same mechanism as tapping a phone so it's just as fast.
It's actually more convenient in most cases as many places don't have their credit card terminals right in front of where you're served, so the cashier has to walk over to a terminal. With a card, I hand it to them and say "just tap" - they handle the rest while I wait and talk with whoever I'm with (or check my phone if I'm on my own). With a phone, I'd have to walk over to the terminal, wait for the cashier to key in the pricing and then hope that Touch ID won't stuff up while I hold it near the contactless reader. I also can't check my phone while I'm doing that, because I need to use it to make the payment.
Tapping cards works so well and is so widely supported that I was able to live just fine with a near-destroyed debit MasterCard (and zero cash) for nearly six months a few years ago. The plastic was coming off and prevented it from being inserted into a terminal, but by 2012/2013 our retail sector had such widespread support for contactless payments that it didn't matter. For the purchases over $100 I made, I tapped and then entered my PIN.
Despite Australia being the highest users of contactless payments in the world (per capita, of course), Apple Pay has had a very slow launch here. It only works for Amex (which no one uses as no one accepts it due to high fees), and MasterCard/VISA cards for one of our big four banks. The banks aren't interested in dealing with Apple due to extra fees that Apple wants to impose, and consumers aren't pressuring the banks or Apple to make a compromise because the current experience is already good enough.
Maybe there's something "magical" that I'm missing out on, but I really don't get why phone-based payments are being so widely hyped. It's already a solved problem.
For reasons I don't understand, the credit card makers have spent many years bringing the new chip cards to market, they include much higher technology than ever offered before, yet the payment process takes much longer. Of course these few seconds don't matter that much per transaction, but think it might be enough to actually make a meaningful difference in staffing levels and line lengths at big stores in December.
I do understand the fees though. The credit card brands and banks have worked themselves, through years of diligent effort, into a business where they can impose a kind of "tax" of 3% on most of the retail economy across the entire US. This is obviously of immense economic value to them, and they will work very hard at every level to maintain it for as long as possible. On the other hand, paying these companies a 3% tax on every retail transaction is... rather surprising in the grand scheme of things, and seems unlikely to persist for that much longer.