in case anybody is interested, i moved from the US to Europe this year.
Here in Yurp, it's damn near 100% contactless. I took it a step further, I am one of the seeming few who pays with their phone. But it works fine, I have yet to find the store that cannot take Apple Card transactions. Can't say that in the US, contactless payment is very much hit-or-miss as far as acceptance by merchants.
Where I live now, many people still take out their bank card and wave it at the terminal, but NOBODY swipes a card here.
I believe PIN and Chip were made mandatory in the EU around 10 years ago. Soon after, many banking institutions deactivated the option to authenticate via signature.
I haven't seen a swipe reader for many, many years. It's contactless or Chip insertion.
Here in Spain, phone payments are common. If I need cash I can get cardless withdrawals from cash machines using my phone or enable other phone users to take out cash sans card. My cards can also be suspended/reactivated at will via the bank's app.
Even the pizza delivery guy will probably have a contactless reader to process the payment. No lower limit either. No PIN required up to 50€.
They already took action to eliminate the need for the stripe when they made the merchant swiping a card responsible for any fraudulent charges. Mag swipe readers have been fading away ever since. At this point, the only real need is for low cost portable swiping units like at farmer's markets -- but even there many take Apple Pay.
Retail worker in Canada, and as a rule, the mag strip is rejected by the merchant device - with one exception. Cards which don’t have a chip or tap can swipe (think AmEx or Union Bank China). It’s been this way for a few years now. Merchants are required to offer chip&pin and tap, swipe only if the other options aren’t offered by the card issuer.
It has a magnetic strip, not that I'll ever use it; does any country other than the USA still have any use for this technology?
Japan uses an NFC standard (FeliCa) different than most of the world, so if you go there and don’t have an iPhone, you’ll probably be using the mag stripe.
When I was last in Japan it seemed most of the places I used my credit card including convenience stores had chip reader enabled terminals. And for those stores that didn’t take credit cards I would use Apple Pay to add money to my iPhone based Suica and use that
No need for chip and pin. Contactless and pin is fine even for large purchases. At least here in CZ it works perfectly fine.
Interesting, I've never seen contactless and PIN combined. Does it completely do away with the transaction limit of contactless?
Exactly. The PIN overrides the PIN-less limit for low value contactless payments. Because the limit is there to protect the cardholder for volume of transactions without PIN. Works pretty well here
No need for chip and pin. Contactless and pin is fine even for large purchases. At least here in CZ it works perfectly fine.
Interesting, I've never seen contactless and PIN combined. Does it completely do away with the transaction limit of contactless?
It's working perfectly fine here. Yes, the PIN entry allows you to override the limit for low value contactless transactions. It's not about chip or contactless, it's about card holder verification. You can also have low value chip transactions that don't require PIN.
I didn't notice this until traveling abroad (Republic of Georgia) a couple weeks ago, but our credit union's Visa cards have tap, but our MasterCards (which they use for debit) do not. Both my Visa cards have the little wireless symbol next to the chip, the MasterCards do not and require to be inserted in card readers. Not really a big deal for me as I used my Watch to pay for everything everywhere, but my partner was using her debit card and had to have them turn the terminals around to insert the card which is not commonly needed. Wonder why they don't have tap enabled in their cards, or in these particular cards?
As I think about it, the only places around me that still use magnetic stripes are the pumps at gas stations. Coincidentally, they are also a prime site of fraud from crooks installing skimming devices on them.
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I haven't seen a swipe reader for many, many years. It's contactless or Chip insertion.
Here in Spain, phone payments are common. If I need cash I can get cardless withdrawals from cash machines using my phone or enable other phone users to take out cash sans card. My cards can also be suspended/reactivated at will via the bank's app.
Even the pizza delivery guy will probably have a contactless reader to process the payment. No lower limit either. No PIN required up to 50€.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-40429477