Aneace is dead on with his argument that the payment experience needs to be enhanced with customer focussed benefits tied to the transaction, to make the purchase experience more compelling. 

Aneace’s Blog: Cool payment technology that makes contactless much more attractive for merchants

I have no idea why a merchant would want to accept basic, “old way to pay” contactless cards that are not of much benefit, unless someone pays him to upgrade his POS terminals (which is what has been happening for the most part) and if interchange fees are dramatically cut. Giving merchants a simple way to target their existing promotions using behaviour data stored in the chip suddenly changes the game.

Merchants immediately get much more value out of payment cards, with no additional investment or effort. The contactless value proposition for merchants suddenly becomes real, and no longer has to rely essentially on free terminal upgrades and slashed interchange fees.

However the problem lies in bank reality.  I wish “old way to pay contactless” was the problem.  The hard reality is that many banks are implementing old style dip chips, and those will be quickly obsolete.

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