It amazed me when I was on a road trip to the US a couple of years ago and how far behind the adoption of digital banking. I remember just using my debit card for tap at one particular store and the cashier said "Wait, what did you do?"
Obviously many Americans do use tap and do use Apple Pay etc., but the adoption rate certainly did feel slower than in other countries.
Not knocking the Americans, it was a fantastic road trip and they were a great bunch.
Warning - Tangent...
As I understand it, the difference stems from two bits of history. First is apparently the US was earlier to widely deploy credit card terminals creating a substantial pre-EMV infrastructure that worked pretty well. Most all terminals had phone service and phoned-home for real-time authorization of every card swipe transaction. Relatively secure system where the card issuers could quickly flag reported-stolen cards or flag unusual buying patterns and limit the costs of credit card fraud.
Elsewhere, apparently transactions were more often batched at the end of the day - reportedly due to higher costs for phone service and calls. So the delay in authorization led to much higher costs from fraud since the crooks could charge stuff all day and were long gone before the terminals phoned-home. EMV (Europay, Mastercard, Visa) was developed to combat this by providing a degree of local authentication in lieu of real-time authorization with the bank.
Thus in the US the banks/merchants kept deploying the existing card-swipe infrastructure since it worked well enough, and Europe/elsewhere deployed EMV since it was needed for the local authentication.
Then NFC gets developed - and due to its relation to EMV it's easier to deploy across the much more widespread EMV infrastructure and can't be deployed across card-swipe infrastructure. This puts NFC / contactless into consumers hands many years ahead of the US, leading to it being far more commonplace.
US is catching up though since the card processors shifted liability for fraud to incent merchants to replace their infrastructure with EMV capable readers and issuers issued chip cards. Many places have also added NFC to this as well, though consumers are slower to adopt the "tap" action as it's both new and not yet universal. We can thank certain large retailers who haven't enabled/deployed NFC - some because they want you to use their own in-house QR code based payment system (Walmart/Sams, Kroger) and others who just don't for some reason (HomeDepot).
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