NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Transactions from contactless bank cards in the U.S. will “quickly surpass” those from NFC phones by the end of 2020, despite cards being rolled out much later than NFC-enabled wallets, industry veteran Randy Vanderhoof, head of the Secure Technology Alliance industry trade group and the affiliated U.S. Payments Forum, told NFC Times.
U.S. issuers have begun their much-anticipated deployment of contactless EMV cards and are expected to issue tens of millions of cards this year, noted the payments forum in a release Wednesday. And Vanderhoof predicts that transactions from cards and NFC devices will both continue to grow as a percentage of total card transactions over the next five years. Together they will eventually amount to more than half of total card transactions–as they do in other mature contactless markets, he said.
Contactless growth in the U.S. will be helped by the introduction of open-loop payments of fares by more transit authorities, including in such major cities as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and Miami, in addition to Chicago and Portland, Ore., which already allow customers to pay for fares with contactless credit and debit cards and card credentials on NFC devices.
