“Apple Inc. is laying the groundwork for an expanded mobile-payments service, leveraging its growing base of iPhone and iPad users and the hundreds of millions of credit cards on file through its iTunes stores,” Douglas Macmillan and Daisuke Wakabayashi report for The Wall Street Journal.
“Eddy Cue, Apple’s iTunes and App Store chief and a key lieutenant of Chief Executive Tim Cook, has met with industry executives to discuss Apple’s interest in handling payments for physical goods and services on its devices, according to people familiar with the situation,” Macmillan and Wakabayashi report. “In another sign of the company’s interest, Apple moved Jennifer Bailey, a longtime executive who was running its online stores, into a new role to build a payment business within the technology giant, three people with knowledge of the move said. Those people said Apple also spoke to at least five other well-known executives in the payment industry about the position before tapping Ms. Bailey.”
“Forrester Research estimates that Americans will spend $90 billion through mobile payments by 2017, up from $12.8 billion in 2012,” Macmillan and Wakabayashi report. “Just this week, Stripe said it received $80 million in funding that valued the four-year-old startup at $1.75 billion. The same day, activist investor Carl Icahn called for eBay to separate PayPal, which he called ‘a gem’ of its business, into an independent company.”
“Speculation about Apple’s interest heightened earlier this month with the disclosure that Apple had applied for a patent covering payments for goods through a signal sent from a phone to a wireless receiver. The patent could indicate an interest in letting iPhone users pay for goods in stores through their phones,” Macmillan and Wakabayashi report. “Another possibility, raised by one industry executive, would be to reduce fraud by using an iPhone’s fingerprint reader before completing an online purchase.”
Read more in the full article here.
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