Instant / contactless payments



Summary:

In the UK, small shops with heavy transaction fees burden and low margins often have a minimum limit of £5 for card payments. However, big networks with more resources often let you pay as little as you want by card, and they more often have NFC enabled POS devices. Jean-Paul Kogelman shares his personal experience in Canada using contactless NFC payment with a MasterCard which has a maximum transaction limit of $50 but works even for transactions as low as $5. Mike Hearn shares his competitive intelligence that the experience of contactless payments is not good after all due to a high failure rate of ~75%, mainly because merchants require minimum payment sizes before accepting credit cards. The PIN-less mode only works for payments below a certain threshold, so there turns out to be an incredibly thin price range in which the simple touch-to-pay system actually works. Bitcoin can address this issue for sure, but it doesn't concern NFC.


Updated on: 2023-06-08T14:21:35.185215+00:00