The concept of a physical card is obsolete.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.
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.
> The concept of a physical card is obsolete.
We have progressively absorbed single function items into a mobile computer.
Watch, notepad, calendar, phone, flashlight, camera, dictionary, encyclopedia, etc.
The issue with declaring single function items as obsolete is that it removes redundancy and really sets us all up for an increasingly more critical single point of failure in our pocket.
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?
Because your bank doesn't want the hassle of mailing cards. It's another reduction in quality for profit.
And how do you do this without a phone?
I concede that's a drawback pushing us more dependent to owning and carrying a smart phone at all times. But I would say payments just piggy backs on a societal change that already makes it very challenging to opt for a brick phone or nothing.
Also to say, cash remains. That's more radical and effective as a fall back than a card which one can lose. When abroad I remember the anxiety of losing my wallet when abroad. With a phone, it's actually less problematic to walk into a shop, get the cheapest android in there and set up all my banking on it. Half a day of a holiday wasted, that's an acceptable inconvenience given the risk. Losing a card, not really.
Qr apps just sound cumbersome compared to contactless tap to pay.
Contactless is the convenience provided to get us into some wall garden. Apple pay. Google pay. Samsung pay.
These are not open or interchangeable standard, they aren't interested in that. They want our valuable transactional data, and location when those are made.
QR codes are a standard. It allows any bank to issue funds. It's a wire transfer. Transfer are a standard. Any bank can adopt it. Typically a bank adopts it..it doesn't require a specific device or partnership for merchant, nor the payer.
It also offers the ability to transfer funds remotely. In that sense it is more so contact "less" than the proximity handshake that contactless payments do, which is somewhat proprietary.
You can save a QR code, make a payment later. QR codes also are more intuitive because they represent an identity. An electronic device that can be swapped, tempered with, is unhelpful to help figure out a fraud or who we are actually paying until the handshake happens.
More importantly they don't incur a hidden fee for either the payer or merchant. Because it's a transfer. Not a transfer disguised as card payment.
A QR code scan keep the payer in control. Merchant presents an amount to pay, payer initiates the transactions, approves, and gets a confirmation. Can use bank A, or Y, or even a bank in another country, so long as it supports QR scan and a fast wire so that the merchant can be assured the transfer is well received.
Yeah, but... QR codes are annoying. I live in Thailand and I have to scan them every day. Pretty much every time, I wish it was as seamless as Apple 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?
Third party escrow, if you explicitly used one. There's no free lunch.
And now you have invented Visa and MasterCard again.
Rather a dissociated escrowing from payment processing.
When you go to your local restaurant, do groceries you are paying a few percentage in tax for using you card.
Platforms online already act as escrow anyway. PayPal, Stripe, act as escrow..yes they take a percentage, but that's more granted for these cases.