I've noticed a lot of chatter lately about EMV chips and decided to see if AmEx would give me one on my BCP. The rep on the phone said, sure we'll get you an EMV card sent out right away. I get the card and it has the ExpressPay NFC chip which is the contactless technology. This is not what I was thinking in terms of an EMV chip but it piqued my curiosity, so I decided to do a little research on contactless technology since I've used paypass on my freedom MC at CVS a few times and I ordered a Discover Zip for the fun of it.
My instinct is telling me that the payment networks (MC, Visa, AmEx, Disc) aren't looking to bring the Euro style EMV contact chip to all our US cards, but rather slowly roll out the contactless technology with the eventual goal of market saturation in a few years. It makes sense because the contactless technology has the ability for PIN entry with encryption just like the Euro style chips have but less contact means less physical wear and easier future upgradability of the readers. Think about the expanded possibilities. Today we see those Square card readers and the like but down the road with NFC, the phones, tablets, and such may have the radio built-in as some of the Andriod phones now have for Google wallet. This could potentially allow not only the easy ability to pay with a mobile device but also the easier ability to accept payment from that friend whom owes you a few bucks.
I'm guessing that we're not using PINs right now in order to provide less friction for the early adopters, but eventually once more critical mass is reached, they'll start requiring PINs which will help ease concerns of people put off by the contactless method. I know that I'm geeking out on this but I'm thinking that we're hoping for chip and PIN when we already have the future technology on a lot of our cards already. Sure, this doesn't help when traveling in Europe (yet) but I'm questioning why the card issuers would be compelled to move en masse to contact chip and PIN. I've already noticed that wherever I see one NFC capability such as Visa's paywave, the reader also does all of the others like Zip, paypass, and ExpressPay.
