Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple...
by martingordon on Monday October 27, 2014 @12:08AM
(#8513764)
Contactless was a thing here in the US, but at least in my experience, it's going away. I've had a few credit cards replaced over the past couple of months (one Chase, one Amex) and while they've gained an EMV chip, they've also lost contactless functionality (which went by Blink and ExpressPay respectively).
Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple...
by stephen_g on Monday October 27, 2014 @01:59AM
(#8514098)
That's interesting, because in Australia they're really popular and both EMV and PayPass/PayWave came in at the same time and use the same chip in the card. You can actually see the RFID antenna terminating in the EMV chip in one of my cards which is semi-transparent.
Re:CurrentC: The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt to Kill Apple...
by thefreeman on Monday October 27, 2014 @01:47AM
(#8514061)
It doesn't sound like they are blocking it on a hardware level. More like their POS system detects that it is an Apple Pay payment and arbitrarily denies it.
I'm not sure what adoption is like in the US, but in Australia pretty much every single plastic credit card (and Visa/MasterCard debit) supports contactless payments, which is an awesome user experience. You literally just pull out the card and touch it to the machine, and some places it's approved in less than a second.
It only works for payments under $100 (for security reasons) - otherwise you chip and pin.
I don't see CurrenC being able to compete with that, chip and pin, or Apple pay...