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Comment by oddevan | Hacker News Reader

If NFC ever takes off as a must-have in the payments world, I'm sure Square would try to use the NFC in phones through their app.

But given that they've already tried a "Just use the app, forget your wallet" approach that didn't take off like they wanted, I'm guessing they're not ready to try anything outside of mainstream payment cards.

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NFC (specifically PayPass, PayWave & Interac Flash) is becoming fairly ubiquitous in Canada.

How is your experience with the reliability? I was recently up in Edmonton and anecdotally it seemed like people had serious issues with the NFC payment methods. Several times I saw people attempt to pay via NFC, try 5 times, then eventually pay via insertion+PIN. Looked profoundly frustrating.

That does happen occasionally, but I find it's fairly rare, at least for me.

I regularly use it to pay for take-out lunches here in London, has always been pretty reliable.

In Australia, I would say about at least 75% of all in-person payments I make are with PayPass/PayWave. That other 25% is cash and the odd place that hasnt updated their terminals yet. Some banks will even give you like a 5% cash back if you use contactless.

It's very reliable and is the defacto method of payment in places like pubs. Often I'll hand my card over and they'll ask 'Can I just PayWave that?'

I use it all the time here in the UK but if you bend/snap the card at all, it totally breaks and doesn't work at all. Even though the stripe and chip works.

Probably not a big problem but I have a tendency to sit on my card every so often.

> How is your experience with the reliability? I was recently up in Edmonton and anecdotally it seemed like people had serious issues with the NFC payment methods. Several times I saw people attempt to pay via NFC, try 5 times, then eventually pay via insertion+PIN. Looked profoundly frustrating.

Here (Austria) that's mostly because some people have cards without PayPass and they are not aware that they need new cards for it. I never had problems with it and always use it (even for transactions > 25 EUR) in which case it prompts for the PIN. It's super convenient and much faster.

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