[Closed] Contactless payment. China Vs Uk

And I assume that how it will eventually work when we start using crypto as payment (decentralised or central govt Brit Coin)

Yes, paying by phone is convenience etc in China but we are talking about China. The people there are leapfrogging into letting their life totally controlled by the state. They have just started using the technology but once settled all payment will be digital payment and that's where the problems start.

Cash is old fashion but if it ain't broken don't fix it.

Just in a practical sense, you can stop the contacted payments on your son's debit card op.

You can cut it out basically. It's on YT etc I'm sure. It's not a big job.

I do see that contactless is obviously a good idea in a time of covid but might help in the longer turn.😀

Don't get me wrong I'm a big fan of keeping cash around and I make a point of using it in favour of card.

And obviously, I hate that the Chinese Govt know about every single WeChat trans and probably has some next level AI going through it all.

I'm more talking about the UI of contactless. It feels like to me that in China - the customer is in charge of the transaction. Here the retailer is.

And that complacency gets to me a bit. There was a doco in TV where they like triple charged everyone for coffee at a Sunday market who was paying contactless.

in a practical sense, you can stop the contacted payments on your son’s debit card op.

You can cut it out basically. It’s on YT etc I’m sure. It’s not a big job.

No need to do that with most children’s (and possibly adult) accounts it’s an option when you order the card.

Since the OP is aware of the risk of being overcharged I’m not sure why NFC is a risk - check before you tap. The Chinese system doesn’t account well for butterfingers on the customer side if you Miskey the price.

In terms of lost cards, lots of banks will let you temporarily disable a lost card in their app. Personally I’ve never heard of anyone’s lost card being used fraudulently - the vast majority of people are honest.

I’d say there’s as much chance of a malevolant friend “borrowing” your phone and misusing it with a QR code approach as a card being lost then used.

No downsides to electronic payments. Makes fraud harder if not impossible and though it impacts on the black ‘cash in hand’ economy I’m sure there are ways around it. If you think our state has the bandwidth to monitor your purchasing habits then unless you’re a drug dealer or international terroist i really don’t think they have the time to do that. Don’t flatter yourself that you’re that interesting. And any money or investments or debts you currently have are electronic anyway so why are you bothered about a bit of pocket change?

I don't think the WeChat QR code would reduce the chance of being overcharged...

Seller presents you with a price (whether it's visible on contactless terminal or you need to type it in yourself) and you accept and pay. In both cases, you need to clock that the price is incorrect to avoid being overcharged.

I don't even need the retailers help, I double charged myself for a £20 box of beer a few weeks ago using the supermarket self scan! Lost the receipt now but it probably evens up considering I know I've forgotten to checkout odd bits of fruit and veg with un-scanable barcodes in the past, and forgetting to increase the quantity when buying multiple boxes at least once.

We have an effectively cashless system here in Sweden and the process described by the OP is one we have in an app called Swish. It sits on my phone and I can send money instantly to another person or business using their mobile number, a QR code or a business number.

I get to check he amount and number before is send it and there is a real-time confirmation when it arrives. It also requires the use of a cryptographically secure second factor (essentially an e-ID) to confirm which most people have on their phone too.

It’s awesome. I can buy stuff from shops or people with it. I can buy large amounts or use it for small transactions. It does not cost me an öre to use and I can use it in person or over a distance and be reasonably sure that the person I send it to is the person I want to send it to.

Wouldn’t you rather be doing it that way?

Not really TBH and I'm not sure I see your issue.
I don't think I've ever paid contactless without the amount being displayed in the screen for the buyer to check.... So is that even a thing?
I pay 95% if the time with my {android} phone - even if I have my card with me as it's safer (Google pay actually uses a different card number to that on your card reducing the potential for retailer fraud using your card number).
I sure my revolut account for non-business purchases {no transaction fee} and generally I get a confirmation on my phone before the till says the payment has been authorised!

Cash is old fashion but if it ain’t broken don’t fix it.

But it is.

1. Don't have enough cash on me? Damn wheres the nearest cash point.
2. You can lose physical cash a lot easier than being stolen electronically.
3. Cash in hand = tax avoidance opportunities.
4. Physical Cash has to be created which is an environmental burden.

I think paypal has the same technology, but requires the retailer to have the QR code which I don't recall seeing anywhere (then again, I haven't been anywhere for 12 months!)

Open Banking payments are what you're describing for the UK. It's a way of doing a bank transfer that cuts out the visa/mastercard bit.

Not much out there at the moment but here's a demo. Works best on a mobile with a reasonably modern banking app installed (for biometric auth).

Scan the QR code or click on the link to start it.  There's a bit of stuff to do with choosing a charity and gift aid which obviously wouldn't be there for yer sugarcane juice guy - after that, set the amount, choose your bank, log in, make transfer.

Not sure if it will ever go as far as WeChat here given the cultural differences, which adds a bit of friction to the experience, but there's a lot to like about this approach.

(nearly full disclosure, I work for one of the companies named above)

vWouldn’t you rather be doing it that way?

No.

Tap watch, walk away.

Cash is old fashion but if it ain’t broken don’t fix it.

Cash is totally broken, but that's a crazy notion. Of course people should try to improve things.

I've used wepay/alipay - felt awkward to me.

Cash has its place. If you're a journalist then it might be in your interests to ensure some purchases are not trackable. Every purchase that's digitised can help form a profile of an individual. Their interests and likely what their travel plans are. They may need to pay an informant/whistleblower who certainly wouldn't want to take a trackable form of payment.

To say, 'If you think our state has the bandwidth to monitor your purchasing habits then unless you’re a drug dealer or international terroist i really don’t think they have the time to do that. Don’t flatter yourself that you’re that interesting.' is wrong. The government can, and are changing the bar as to what is legal and what isn't legal as we speak. People of interest could be from any walk of life. Activists/protestors for example. Your comments are trying to encourage complacency. Any digitised purchase is just a case of joining the dots. Any competent investigator can do that.So, from a freedom of news aspect cash is useful.

People who work on low incomes. They can benefit from cash in hand work. Not all work in lucrative IT jobs hobnobbing with their colleagues in air conditioned offices, some do actual proper work that involves graft and can shorten their lifespans.

I think options need to exist but to eliminate cash altogether is not an option in my opinion, if you're in government your opinion will differ.

I disagree. I am not in government and I think he cases that you highlight are very minor edge cases.

If you are low income and are working cash in hand, you are being cheated. If you are working _for_ someone and being paid cash, then you are being cheated out of NI contribution, sick pay, leave and all the things that you _should_ be given. If this is your choice, then you are not going to be getting a full pension later in life.

The journalism thing is also wrong I think. For a start, you don’t pay whistleblowers. That makes it a bribe and means they might lose the protections they should be legally entitled to. Informants? You can still pay them contactless or give them a gift card or... worst case just use a prepaid Visa card.

A country like the U.K. or Sweden, the payment thing is run by a bank, not the state. It can be investigated the same way as cash withdrawals can. I would argue that most bulk cash purchases will be criminal and avoiding them makes a society move away from that.

Anything that makes it easier for micro businesses to easily get paid by a public that for the most part doesn't use cash, and without Visa/Mastercard skimming the profits of our sugarcane vendor, is great imo.

On the more recent points above - there are about 1m people in the UK without a basic bank account so removing cash from society entirely is a bit problematic, right now, and I don't see why that's a useful goal anyway?

I’m more talking about the UI of contactless. It feels like to me that in China – the customer is in charge of the transaction. Here the retailer is.

Does it matter? The price is the same and you only get charged if you choose to do so.

I find contactless (in the UK) effortless, would be a PITA if I had to enter the amount first.

People who work on low incomes. They can benefit from cash in hand work

So its OK for them to avoid paying tax?

I’m more talking about the UI of contactless. It feels like to me that in China – the customer is in charge of the transaction.

If I was a retailer I'd be somewhat concerned about a system where the customer enters what the payment is.

People who work on low incomes. They can benefit from cash in hand work. Not all work in lucrative IT jobs hobnobbing with their colleagues in air conditioned offices, some do actual proper work that involves graft and can shorten their lifespans.

Wow. Chip on your shoulder much?

People who work on low incomes. They can benefit from cash in hand work

So its OK for them to avoid paying tax?

I’m more talking about the UI of contactless. It feels like to me that in China – the customer is in charge of the transaction.

If I was a retailer I'd be somewhat concerned about a system where the customer enters what the payment is.

.... And how does the retailer record transactions?

Another example from the market. We were hanging out side some food stalls. Huge queue for fried tofu. Crazy popular. I noticed customers prepaying on WeChat while they were queueing. When they got to the front they just told the staff what they paid for and the food got handed over. Imagine that at a festival.

In regards to cash - 100% of my income is received digitally into my bank account. However I almost exclusively use cash when I'm out on the high street or in town for the night. I'll go over to France with euro notes in my pocket.
Keeping cash alive is important for me as it solves alot of problem for people who are not me.
My dad is a refugee - he can't read English. He wouldnt have no chance trying to check the validity of transactions on a monthly card statement. Expecially as it lists the retailer and not the good/service
Elderly neighbor wants me to do her shopping during lock down. How will she pay for it if not giving me cash to take with me?

Anyhow this this thread wasn't supposed to be another discussions on cash it was more about how a billion like to do it one way and a billion like to do it another.

Or how about this.

Amazon saves my credit card for future purchases.
If the owner of the corner store (who I've known for 5 years) asked me if he could save my card details to make it easier for future purchases....

Amazon saves my credit card for future purchases.
If the owner of the corner store (who I’ve known for 5 years) asked me if he could save my card details to make it easier for future purchases….

Not sure how that's relevant?

I mean, you're still trusting WePay with some kind of payment details.

OP - your concern about your son's lack of care around losing things is not best addressed through another app.

Been there. Had one of mine leave a 4 week old phone at trail centre cafe. I didn't buy him another. He hated it.
He's now not lost a phone, wallet or cash in 3 years. Lesson learned.

I'm not sure exactly how WeChat pay works but I think it's like PayPal but you actually tend to have a positive WeChat balance at all times.

Cash/Card/App - none is a solution to my son loosing stuff - I know that. He's got to internalise the importance of these objects somehow.

Anyway not advocating WeChat or the UK equivalent. Im just saying there seam to be different ways to do things.

When I was traveling through China, I didn't have WeChat, HSBC were charging me a bomb for transactions so I used cash. Cash was tricky at markets. Shops and hotels we're ok.

The corner store comment I made is more about trust and where we place it. Amazon we trust? - but the corner store owner I say hello to every week would be well out of order if he offered to kept my card details?

Anyhow not arguing or looking for advice - just interested in what others thought about it these minor things

Cashless is another brilliant way of transferring the cost from the bank to the customer because they don't want to service the cash machines or they don't want another excuse to close a branch.

Shops add the cost of card transactions into a purchase. I've encountered that a few times. If the shop isn't doing it at the till then the goods will have had the cost incorporated into their purchase price.

What if someone doesn't want or can't afford a smart phone and or doesn't have a bank account, cashless won't work for them.

In response to condoning not paying tax. To be honest so long as tax havens exist which are used by groups with significantly more money than laborers doing a bit of work on the side for cash, yeah why not.

Cash will be around forever.

Shops add the cost of card transactions into a purchase. I’ve encountered that a few times. If the shop isn’t doing it at the till then the goods will have had the cost incorporated into their purchase price.

Shops pay to pay cash into their bank accounts. Often more than card fees. Not even accounting for the fact that they need to pay someone to count the money and take it to the bank.

I've been in China a few years. It took me a while to stop going to an ATM and withdrawing cash and carrying it around with me, struggling to get used to the language and choose which notes to use. The hand signal for "6" is "I love you" in BSL which causes me no end of mirth.

I haven't used NFC, even though my phone and smartband can use it. I don't want to use face recognition because I'm wary of it. CCTV here has software that can identify people even with masks on.....

I now use QR codes to pay everywhere. I use two e-wallet payment systems, Alipay and Wepay. Two formats of paying: Scan their QR code, or you present your QR code to be scanned by their system. The first requires you to manually input the price, for smaller merchants. The latter is for larger, trusted merchants.

You check your bank balance before paying, or transfer funds from your bank to one of the services. If you're worried about spending getting out of control, balancing your household expenses, then the transfer method is a good compromise. You only use what's in the balance of the service you transfer to, so can't spend more than you planned. A lot of people looking at e-wallet systems from the outside don't have this knowledge of balances/transfers so subconsciously panic over how they'd overspend all the time. You can choose in the e-wallet app to pay from linked bank, or from balance. This means, for a child, you can load their balance up with pocket money and they can only spend what they've got on it, not drain a bank account.

On the monitoring side of things, as a customer I don't care. They already know through the old debit card system what and where your spending habits lay. But I can see how a lot of CTs (conspiracy theorists) started off in the UK, Once you believe one, you tend to get sucked down the rabbit hole and believe them all, so the CT pyramid goes. Many small merchants in the UK were taking cash from customers and not filling in VAT forms, not reporting earnings to HRMC. These people have fears over e-wallet payments. The number of people who weren't reporting their earnings and had issues with furlough payments might lead to an explanation of what was going on.

Pros: Easy to do, fast, hygienic (no physical contact like cash)

Negatives: need to keep phone charged, and safe from the weather (if you're out of the city hiking/cycling this can be an issue) Sometimes you find small merchants unable to take e-wallet payments and so a small amount of cash needs to be carried for them (or move on to the next merchant!)

I have a 1rmb note on me (12pence?) that I use for teaching purposes "this is 'note' money". But otherwise I haven't had any cash on me for at least 14 months.

Cash is old fashion but if it ain’t broken don’t fix it.

Are you 85 years old. Cash should have gone years ago, it is irrelevant today and not needed at all.

It's almost that we've stalled at the last hurdle.
I shop with Sainsbury's app when I get to the till I scan the QR code, this transfers the shopping to the till. All good so far.

But now I have to touch where everyone else has touched, I pay contactless but you can see the patches of smoothness from all the touches.