It's a backup. I've heard from retailers that the failure rate on the chips is much higher than it is for swiping.
In Australia you pay for fuel after filling up, and one fuel station owner is dealing with an average of a driver or two a day who is unable to pay for fuel.
They don't carry cash, the chip/EMV is failing and they don't have the mag stripe linked to a facility since they're often debit cards.
Apparently the failure rate on phone based payments is also high(er).
It's one of those issues I wouldn't have considered before speaking to retailers.
That's why I always carry at least two cards. Cards fail, get blocked because of leaked data, bank fraud systems produce a lot of false positives etc..
The problem with a cashless society really is that you assume the tech is reliable. Unfortunately, that's often not the case.
When gas hit $4 a gallon in the US (yes that was considered expensive here), many of the stations disabled the "pump then pay" feature because of all the drive-offs they were getting (petrol theft). So you'd have to go inside to get the clerk to enable the pump.
I know you're speaking of NFC chips in cards, but you might know — Does the phone version (Apple Pay/Android Pay/Samsung Pay) still work when my phone's battery is dead?
In Australia you pay for fuel after filling up, and one fuel station owner is dealing with an average of a driver or two a day who is unable to pay for fuel.
They don't carry cash, the chip/EMV is failing and they don't have the mag stripe linked to a facility since they're often debit cards.
Apparently the failure rate on phone based payments is also high(er).
It's one of those issues I wouldn't have considered before speaking to retailers.