Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

I'm not hopeful that contactless will take-off in the US either.

The USA is finally moving to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of using smart cards rather than the archaic mag-stripe, as the liability shift that took place in Europe 10 years ago is swinging into force now.

But it might be too late, and you might be right, the likes of ApplePay may well take over entirely in the USA.

Elsewhere, where Apple have less market share this may not be true, and the US may end up in a ghetto of 1, again, with its own market dynamics and tech that's not applicable in the rest of the world.

View on HN

Apple Pay and contactless are both the same technology & same standards. If you support one, it's essentially trivial to support the other. Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well.

>> Apple Pay and contactless are both the same technology & same standards. If you support one, it's essentially trivial to support the other

Ah, this I didn't know, thanks.

>> Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well.

It's different hardware. Historically the hardware has been more likely to support ICC/EMV and not NFC, but if the US is actually ever going to do a big EMV rollout then (were I the I the sort of person in charge of buying the equipment) it makes sense to go for both.

I'm sort-of interested in the Apple Pay thing now. (only sort-of, I find payments tech mostly to be incredibly boring). I've not worked on NFC/EMV contactless kernels but I understand that, unlike with the physical chip versions, you tend to need at least some amount of custom code for each card scheme. This has been put down to the schemes not pulling together quite so well this time around.

What about the advent of current technology that Samsung recently acquired, Looppay (MST), that uses a magentic tokenization to be able to complete transactions? These are useful and readily accessible with 90% of POS terminals that read the magnetic stripe on your credit card. It if different from the RFID-based NFC but it can be used compatible as current POS systems transfer to EMV-updated systems that will also support NFC transactions. This MST technology is mostly srpead to Japan and not neccessarily in the US though our current terminals are already ready to accept these payments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com