Humans crave contact — just not at the checkout counter, it turns out.

Our State of Contactless Payments 2021 report is out, and it affirms what we’ve been witnessing in retail for the past year-plus: Consumers are gravitating toward contactless payments. More than 83% of the 1,000 respondents have used contactless checkout in the past year.

Broad contactless payment adoption seems like an inevitability now. It wasn’t always that way, as only about 3% of American debit and credit cards enabled c...