Only about five percent of the roughly 480 million cards in service in the United States had contactless payment technology in 2017, according to research by ATKearney. What's more, they only make up about 0.18% of all transactions.
That's an issue Visa and Chase are trying to tackle together.
Their first move: issuing cards with the new contactless capabilities as quickly as third party issuers are able to churn them out.
"Right now we have roughly close to 20 million cards, give or take, in the market and every week we keep adding more," Abeer Bhatia, president of Card Marketing, Pricing and Innovation at Chase, told reporters at a media event this week.
"By the end of the year we should have about half our credit cards contactless and debit cards are going to start sometime this summer. By the end of 2020 we should be nearing 70 to 80 million credit cards in the marketplace that are contactless."