“Together with Mastercard’s experimentation with biometrically secured payment cards, the EMV partnerships could be seen as part of a larger effort to compete with the convenience of mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay…”

Mastercard has teamed up with two major payments services companies to help drive the adoption of EMV technology in the US.

Verifone will lend a hand by integrating Mastercard’s M/Chip Fast technology into its POS solutions, which the company says are used by most of the top 200 retailers in the US. Meanwhile, Global Payments will bring M/Chip Fast to its customers in the food retail and transportation industries.

It’s the latest big move in Mastercard’s effort to drive EMV chip adoption in the US, where many retailers lack the NFC technology that allows EMV-based contactless payments. M/Chip Fast isn’t contactless, but is designed to make the card-inserted verification process much faster.

Together with Mastercard’s experimentation with biometrically secured payment cards, the EMV partnerships could be seen as part of a larger effort to compete with the convenience of mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, with the latter actually enabling contactless payments even with traditional swipe-based card readers, thanks to its magnetic secure transmission technology.