Tap-pay with my Visa card is commonplace in downtown Toronto and faster and easier than doing the same with my phone.
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.
Both tap and chip and pin are so fast now in Canada that it's great. The US payment infrastructure is still mostly terrible. In many cases, even with chip cards it's chip and signature!
We don't have pins on our chip cards and as far as I'm aware, no bank is issuing CCs with pins with or without a chip. Debit cards use PINs, but bring a host of other liability problems to the user, and almost universally lack the rewards programs which consumers with good credit take advantage of (because hey, I get 2-3% towards travel expenses while paying the same).
Are you sure? The only information I can find that agrees with you is about debit cards, where PIN means it uses a different payment network. Credit PIN uses the same network as credit signature, so it seems unlikely the fees would be different.
I've been doing this with a MasterCard Paypass-based card for probably close to ten years? Now I have a Visa card that's payWave based, which is essentially the same thing.
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.
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.