The rush is on worldwide to support Apple’s revolutionary Apple Pay

“Apple Inc’s new mobile payments system – unveiled just ten days ago – is already winning over the heavyweights of the financial industry and signaling the likely demise of lesser payment alternatives,” Eric Auchard reports for Reuters. “Its secret? Apple Pay preserves many existing relationships while inserting a new dominant player – itself – as kingmaker. Its potential audience? The 800 million Apple users who have already connected credit and debit cards to iTunes accounts.”

“Apple Pay allows consumers using new Apple phones or soon-to-be-released tablets and smartwatches to buy things by simply holding the device up to readers installed by store merchants. Launched on Friday in the new iPhone 6s, it was first unveiled on Sept 9, when the giants of the credit card industry – Visa, MasterCard and American Express – declared their commitment to making the Apple service work,” Auchard reports. “Big brand retailers have also signed up and now major banks are racing to out-do on another in promoting the service to customers, hoping to win the lion’s share of their spending and the lucrative transaction business that comes with that.”

“Softcard, the U.S. consortium of top U.S. mobile network operators, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile USA, said last week that it was working with Apple to develop a SIM-card based version in 2015,” Auchard reports. “And French payments company Ingenico signed a deal this week with Loewe, the Spanish luxury handbag and fashion retailer owned by LVMH, to provide Apple Pay services for its network of 160 stores in 34 countries. ‘Without a doubt, the rush is on to cooperate,’ said Forrester Research payments analyst Denée Carrington.”

“Square, the credit-card reader start-up that is the second act for Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, has said its terminals used by many retailers will accept Apple Pay from customers,” Auchard reports. “Apple is already working with Twitter to create a ‘Buy Now’ button for Twitter users and with Facebook to offer an Apple Pay “Buy” button to its users, according to Trip Chowdhry, a financial analyst at Global Equities Research.”

Read more in the full article here.

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17 Comments

  1. The 800-pound gorilla snoozing quietly in the corner is the severe and suddenly-unfortunate lack of NFC-enabled POS terminals. Major retailers in my area have been quite busy replacing these lately in preparation for the upcoming chip-cards — but NOT with NFC units 🙁

    1. They’ll soon have to replace those POS POS (not a typo: piece-of-sh!t point-of-sale) terminals with the ApplePay-compatible ones, once they realise that they may be on the hook for any fraudulent transaction conducted with the plastic card with a chip (for magnetic stripe type, credit card will absorb the loss).

        1. It shouldn’t. The whole point of this double secrecy is so that neither your bank, nor Apple knows what you paid for, and the merchant doesn’t get to know anything about you. The only thing they all get to know with this system is that a specific amount of money has changed hands. Merchant receives this amount of money (but doesn’t get to know from whom); bank gets to pay specific amount of money (but doesn’t get to know for what), and Apple gets to know nothing, except that a specific amount of money has changed hands on behalf of someone, so it can collect its commission for the transaction from the paying bank.

    2. The payment card industry is giving merchants until October 2015 to have the NFC units inplace. After that, if the transaction does not use NFC the merchant will be charged the same rate as if the credit card was not present. Merchants who do a lot of credit card business will make sure that they have this capability by then or it will cost them big bucks.

  2. What interests me is the Apple Pay button and the similar buttons developed with Twitter and Facebook.

    Will these buttons licence the 1-click technology patented by Amazon, for which Apple already pays them through its use in iTunes? If so, it increases the number of tributaries of Amazon’s river of cash — with Jeff Bezos hardly needing to lift a finger (other than to grant such licences).

  3. How about this for a thought…

    I’m a business owner and I want a customer to pay me direct to my iPhone using apple pay.

    So in effect my iPhone becomes the terminal for payment in this situation.

    If this isn’t in apple pay it really should be.

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