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blakeh95 t1_j6jgdm8 wrote

Contactless and contact methods have different processing flows.

https://www.uspaymentsforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Optimizing-Txn-Speed-WP-FINALV3-October-2017.pdf

See Page 9 for Contact and Page 21 for Contactless. You don't need to know the exact specifications, but look at the pink box between the card/device and the reader. For Contact, observe there are 3 round trip communications; for Contactless, there are 2.

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stevehockey1 t1_j6k16fz wrote

Although the flow is different, the time taken to communicate between merchant, payment processor, issuer are all in the milliseconds, 1 trip increases the time by maybe 5 milliseconds, no one would really notice it.

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