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  • The U.S. Is Behind on Mobile Payments, But We’re Catching Up [telecom

    From Bill Horne@21:1/5 to All on Sun Oct 2 16:29:04 2022
    By Joe Fedewa

    Using a phone or watch to pay at a terminal is not new. iPhones and
    Android devices have both been able to do it for a long time. So why
    is the U.S. still lagging behind with mobile payments?

    In other parts of the world, such as China, nearly 90% of people use
    mobile payments. That’s more than double the U.S., but adoption is not
    the only problem. The infrastructure for mobile payments in the
    U.S. is just not there yet.

    https://www.howtogeek.com/833644/mobile-payments-are-still-not-great-in-the-u.s./

    --
    (Please remove QRM from my email address to send a message to my personal account)

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  • From Michael Trew@21:1/5 to Bill Horne on Sun Oct 2 22:06:28 2022
    On 10/2/2022 12:29, Bill Horne wrote:
    By Joe Fedewa

    Using a phone or watch to pay at a terminal is not new. iPhones and
    Android devices have both been able to do it for a long time. So why
    is the U.S. still lagging behind with mobile payments?

    In other parts of the world, such as China, nearly 90% of people use
    mobile payments. That’s more than double the U.S., but adoption is not
    the only problem. The infrastructure for mobile payments in the
    U.S. is just not there yet.

    I believe that is also related to your region. I've heard from
    west-coast friends that mobile-payments are more common out their way.
    In the mid-west (eastern Ohio), I very rarely see such a thing. Many
    elderly people would not understand how it works. While I'm younger, I
    do not have a smart phone.

    In Germany, cash is still king. It appears that just fewer than half of transactions are now in cash, as of late, but historically, Germans have
    held onto their cash. Citing 2019 NPR article, linked below:

    https://www.npr.org/2019/06/09/728323278/for-many-germans-cash-is-still-king

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  • From Garrett Wollman@21:1/5 to Michael Trew on Tue Oct 4 17:11:23 2022
    In article <Esr_K.532286$Ny99.380632@fx16.iad>,
    Michael Trew <michael.trew@att.net> wrote:

    I believe that is also related to your region. I've heard from
    west-coast friends that mobile-payments are more common out their way.
    In the mid-west (eastern Ohio), I very rarely see such a thing.

    "Mobile payments" use the same EMV ("Europay, Mastercard, Visa"[1])
    near-field communications technology as tap-to-pay credit cards, which
    nearly all banks are issuing now. It's probably possible for a
    merchant to buy a payment terminal that doesn't support NFC but any
    new point-of-sale installation is going to include it.

    That doesn't mean that the banks don't put barriers in the way of
    enabling mobile "wallets" like Apple/google/Samsung Pay. For example,
    my credit union contracts out its credit card business to a bank
    called Elan, and while they're perfectly happy to issue me a
    contactless credit card, they make it a hassle to enroll that card in
    Google Pay -- you can't use the on-device enrollment flow, you have to
    speak to a customer-service representative on the phone and get an authorization code. Many people presumably just give up at this
    point.

    -GAWollman

    [1] Europay merged with Mastercard about 20 years ago, but at the time
    the standard for "chip and pin" payments was being promulgated in
    Europe, those three companies were the major card networks in Europe,
    and name has stuck even though the company no longer exists.
    --
    Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can, wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
    my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

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