The US is Ready for Contactless Card Mobile Payments, Says Visa

Contactless cards have been a major new entry in the mobile payments market in large parts of the world. The European Union is quite fond of them, and so too is Canada and the UK, still kind-of-sort-of-technically part of the EU. In fact, around 40 percent of face-to-face Visa transactions in those regions is done by contactless card. Now, Visa asserts, the concept is ready to spread, and take on a larger role in American operations.

Most issuers don’t even offer contactless cards, and that means most customers aren’t putting them to work either. Yet, Visa asserts by way of its vice president of consumer products and head of global contactless payments Daniel Sanford, the time is ripe.

Yet issuers may be gunshy. Given the sheer number of retailers out there who haven’t even moved to Europay / Mastercard / Visa (EMV) operations yet—simply choosing to take the risk on the chin since they do so little credit card business to begin with—there’s a bit of a lag involved. Plus, even with the stores that went EMV, they did so with contact-only chip cards, making the move to contactless that much harder to see happen. There were contactless efforts made, but those tended to focus on mobile wallet systems like Apple Pay.

As Sanford notes, however, the move to EMV has paved the way for contactless cards, and now, around 95 percent of the heavy lifting has been done. A small push now will open up the contactless card market.

The problem will be convincing the market to make another upgrade after it just made an upgrade. With small businesses about to be two steps behind, and large businesses still reeling from the latest upgrade-or-else phenomenon, there will likely be a lot of push-back in terms of moving to contactless. Since the customers aren’t particularly interested either—though how much of that is that they never had the chance?—that’s going to put even less iron in the spines of businesses for another change.

While most of the groundwork may already be laid, there’s no doubt that businesses will hesitate before bringing out another change that may not be that helpful, no matter what Visa says. Still, the possibilities are there, and may prove realized sooner than some expect.