[rsynnott]

So in Europe for a long time, tap to pay was normally via _card_, not phone. I don’t think there was a common phone-based EMVish standard before Apple and Google Pay came out (there were a few weird stored value things), but tap-able EMV cards showed up around 2007 (again, there were various local and national proprietary stored value cards before that, but in most cases they never really caught on).

Another factor may be that American card terminals were traditionally quite slow, or at least vendors rarely prioritised speed (I have no idea _why_ this was the case, but it definitely seems to have been the case). Tap to pay really works best if the auth can happen within a second or so.