“Mobile payments, or the notion that you can pay for goods and services at the checkout with your smartphone, may finally break into the mainstream if Apple and the iPhone 6 get involved,” Roger Cheng reports for CNET.
“While Apple doesn’t talk about future products, Wired was the latest to report that the next iPhone would include mobile-payment capabilities powered by a short-distance wireless technology called near-field communication, or NFC,” Cheng reports. “Apple’s embrace of mobile payments would represent a watershed moment for how people pay at drugstores, supermarkets, or for cabs. The technology and capability to pay with a tap of your mobile device has been around for years… but awareness and usage remain low. Apple’s visibility and massive user base – it already holds credit card data for about 800 million iTunes account holders — could change that.”
“‘Apple has again the opportunity to transform, disrupt and reshape an entire business sector,’ said Roger Entner, a consultant at Recon Analytics. ‘It is hard to overestimate what impact Apple could have if it really wants to play in the payments market,'” Cheng reports. “‘Apple’s already made great inroads with Passbook,’ said Maribel Lopez, an analyst at Lopez Research. ‘It could totally crack open the mobile payments space in the US.'”
Read more in the full article here.
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