I was wondering why
PYMNTS was all but saying that Apple Pay was a failure the other day. It's almost as though they expected this article to come out or something. *shrug*
(I've always found them to be anti-Apple Pay, but I haven't figured out why.)
The technical piece of enabling contactless is generally not complicated at all.
EMVco and card network certification (up to four separate ones or more because each of their contactless standards is at least a little bit different) can bump up the technical challenges significantly. For instance, a few places disabled contactless entirely when Visa's EMV contactless mandate took effect earlier this year (instead of upgrading their magnetic stripe-based contactless implementations). It's similar to how a lot of places had chip hardware for quite a while before actually being able to turn it on.
Of course, the challenges would be a lot less had retailers not gone with custom POS integrations and the like, but it's obvious at this point that they'll never give up on those.
On the business side, there are other factors. I don't know how it works in your country, but in the US it's pretty common for banks to issue debit cards that can also act like credit cards (i.e. no PIN required, gets authorized like a credit card even though it ultimately comes out of the checking account). They do this because the gov't here capped the interchange fee that big banks can charge to authorize debit transactions. The fee the banks charge for credit transactions isn't capped, so it's in the banks best interest that customers choose to process transactions from their checking account as "credit".
Merchants know this, and many big merchants (once they figure out you've swiped/dipped a combo card into the payment terminal) will attempt to get you to process the transaction as "debit", not "credit". It saves the merchant money if they're able to get you to do that, plain and simple.
That workflow isn't "out-of-the-box" for contactless payments, which I think is one of a few business-related reasons that some of the larger merchants in the US haven't enabled contactless yet.
The Durbin Amendment caps interchange for large banks' debit cards to 0.05% regardless of how they're run, so it shouldn't matter for those to always route over Visa or MC. However, interchange in general
is likely one of the reasons for the continued holdouts. As it is now, most smaller purchases are still done in cash in the US; contactless payment moving a lot of that over to cards instead would be a nightmare for stores' bottom lines, especially since interchange for credit cards and for debit cards not covered under Durbin is much higher than in a lot of other countries. (Note: this is why $5-10 minimums for card use seem to be more common in the US than in the places where interchange has been capped to low levels.)
IMO, at some point, the networks will likely need to start incentivizing retailers to accept contactless by offering at least a token decrease in interchange for such transactions. While I'm sure they may be able to get almost full adoption without it eventually, I can imagine minimums and surcharging ending up significantly more common than they are now--to the point where it's something that's expected at most stores.
As for debit routing with contactless, it's totally possible. For instance, Sprouts and Vons here will prompt for PIN if you tap with a debit card (and will say "debit" on the receipt, too, unlike the "Visa" or "Mastercard" it would say if it wasn't routed as such). Whether stores necessarily want to do that, though, is the question, mainly because it's kind of a UX hassle for customers.