alt Hacker NewsThe concept of a physical card is obsolete. That North Americans and western Europeans for a good part still use them is just stickiness of the infrastructure, and habits.
Developing countries have mostly leapfrogged to total contactless payments.
In South Aast Asia, you typically scan a QR code and approve a payment from your own phone. Far less fraud as a result. Nobody is able to touch your card, you don't have one.
Europe likely identified they better make the jump.
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I don't really understand why this is better than tap and pay with a card. Why would I want a single point of failure for both my communications and my ability to make payments?
Qr apps just sound cumbersome compared to contactless tap to pay.
> Far less fraud as a result.
Who returns your money to you if you purchased something on mail order with this, and it turned out to be fraud?
I can assure you that south east asians also still have cards, despite not making most of their payments with it. Not all ATMs support withdrawing with just a QR code from all banks, for one.
There are benefits to non-QR based payment systems, such as not wanting to pull out your phone, open an app, scan a QR and approve to make a payment that takes me 2 seconds with regular contactless payments.
Physical cards are also a nice fallback to have in cases of running out of battery, theft, etc.