Several years ago contactless cards appeared on the market. The Netherlands were first, and Belgium followed more recently. It is the first time since the introduction of chip and PIN that consumers really experienced a change in their way of making a card payment.

Today contactless cards are a big success in The Netherlands, with more contactless payments than there are old-fashioned chip-and-pin transactions.

In Belgium things are moving a bit slower. It took many years before the infrastructure was ready on acquiring side. Therefore issuers were not in a hurry to start issuing contactless cards. The classic chicken or egg problem.

Nowadays the industry is trying hard to achieve a similar result. The latest public numbers date from April 2018, when 4% of all card payments were contactless. This is extremely low compared to The Netherlands (+50%), but it is an exponential increase of almost 300% compared to the year before (when only 1,41% of all payments were contactless in Belgium according to the same source).

Now the acquiring infrastructure is ready, banks are accelerating the issuing of contactless cards. So:

Chicken: check!

Egg: check!

Customers still need to get used to the taste of chicken and of eggs. Bancontact is trying hard to help with this:

See the differences with The Netherlands, in following commercial from Betaalvereniging Nederland?

In The Netherlands it took about 3 years for contactless to become a mainstream payment method, after the adoption by the market to issue contactless cards. Transposing this to Belgium would mean that contactless will be the new normal in 2020–2021. All big banks have switched (at least for their debit cards) and most smaller banks followed this year, if they didn’t already do so before.