Yes, this is a bit of a strange headline, but I’m not kidding. For NFC payment ‘with’ my mobile device, I actually turn-off NFC to make it work.
OK, so here’s what is going on: You might know from many previous posts that I am not keen on using Google services and have been using LineageOS and now GrapheneOS on my smartphones for many years now. Apart from the many advantages, one of the few remaining limitations is that I can’t use mobile payment services offered by banks. This is because most of them rely on Google Wallet, which is a Google service I don’t have on my device. There are a few exceptions such as the Volksbank in Germany, who use their own wallet for mobile payment. However, I’m not a customer of them, so it was no option for me so far. More and more, however, electronic payment is moving from credit cards to mobile payments, and I recognize the significant improvement in usability. Thus, the pressure to find a solution kept increasing.
One of the ideas I had in the past was that I just put my credit card inside the protective case of the mobile device and hold that over a card reader when paying for something in a store. But for some ‘strange’ reason, that never really worked. The reason, I recently found out, was that the NFC chip of the mobile device and the NFC chip of the credit card both respond to the card reader signals. The card reader terminal then senses an overlap and the transaction doesn’t work. The easy fix: In the Android settings menu, disable NFC. And there we go, mobile payment with that credit card in the back of my mobile phone protective case works like a charm.
Obviously if the phone gets stolen, the credit card is gone as well and can be used for payment of small sums until I can reach the bank and report the card as stolen. So there’s a bit of an increased risk here. But then, even before I figured this out, I always had a plan at hand to block my credit cards should they be stolen, so that is something I can live with.