I’ve gone over to using Samsung Pay for any transaction I can - the good thing about Samsung Pay is that it technically should work even at Mom & Pop stores who haven’t upgraded from swipe transactions. It uses NFC (like Apple Pay etc), but also MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission) which emulates a card being swiped.
At my local grocery when they see me pull out the phone and start the app, they always tell me “We don’t have that kind of system here.” I just smile and hold my phone next to the card swipe and Voila! it works. I’ve found a few readers do have trouble detecting the signal, but the great majority have worked.
The app uses single use tokens for payments, so in theory the worst thing that could happen if there were some sort of hack is that the bad guy gets a one-time use code (that isn’t your credit card number) and can’t use it after that.
(Geeky tidbit: There was an MST hack presented at a security conference last year, but long story short it works in theory but requires a particular circumstance of the hacker standing by with a home made device while your app transmits and then your charge has to be aborted before it goes through, so the bad guy can use your one time code. Not likely in reality.)
Also, just in case I always carry one of these around:
Decent quick report about mobile payments: