Why are contactless payment methods faster than inserting the chip?

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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?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Dipping the EMV chip credit card and tapping a contactless credit card takes the same time in my experience. This is the bank process. It may seem slower only because they make you pull the card out once the entire charge slip printout is done, whereas you can remove the tapped card before the slip is printed for example.

There’s a possibility that the protocol is different elsewhere and EMV processing really needs the card to be in until charge slip printout. But that’s a design flaw if so from when banks didn’t think it’s needed optimize.

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