Ill-informed article as usual and a gung ho response. Contactless spending is primarily a replacement for cash which is used to buy small ticket items. Hence, comparing it to total card spend is like comparing grapefruits with apples. A more appropriate comparison would be total cash against contactless.

Also, not all innovation you claim to have been invented in US was invented pure by US innovators. Not sure you can claim some of them are innovative in the first place. They came out of the pure need to protect old and obsolete acceptance infrastructure. Tokenization and end to end encryption were “invented” to protect magstripe data which was being captured and sent in the clear for criminals to intercept. The US is plagued by payment card data compromises because of magstripe and this is the only way the data can be secured. Hence, it is innovation to patch old technology and not something mind bending innovative either. BTW in a fully CHIP and PIN environment tokenization and end to end encryption does not really deliver any value as the data is already cryptographically protected and offers no value to anyone who intercepts it.
The underlying cause of counterfeit is not EMV but the magtsripe UK and other European markets still have to support to enable their customers to transact in not EMV markets including the US and vice-versa. Added to that is the reliant of the US on older technology like card verification code to prevent online fraud. CHIP and PIN was never invented to prevent online fraud over the internet. Hence, any claims that say it does not help online fraud are flawed as well. Online fraud in UK and Europe is going up not because of lack of innovative idea but poor adoption and implementation of solutions like Verified by Visa and MasterCard passcode by merchant community.
Finally, J.Gapper’s view on state lead innovation in payment is not entirely flawed either as in Europe at least the state plays a bigger part in ensuring the payment infrastructure operating within a country is robust and secure, either by legal means or where it is feasible developing solutions in collaboration with other stakeholders in the ecosystem.