Why are contactless payment methods faster than inserting the chip?

Question

I found it weird that a wireless technology happens to be faster than a payment method that has actual physical contact with the payment reader. It just seems like it’s the other way around. Like most things are faster when they have a direct wired connection or in this case physical contact but somehow when paying, inserting the chip takes longer than the contactless payment method. Why is that?

In: 109

Answer 1

Contactless and contact methods have different processing flows.

[https://www.uspaymentsforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Optimizing-Txn-Speed-WP-FINALV3-October-2017.pdf](https://www.uspaymentsforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Optimizing-Txn-Speed-WP-FINALV3-October-2017.pdf)

See Page 9 for Contact and Page 21 for Contactless. You don’t need to know the exact specifications, but look at the pink box between the card/device and the reader. For Contact, observe there are 3 round trip communications; for Contactless, there are 2.