“Deborah Hall-Lefevre is making the biggest bet of her 23-year IT career,” Bill Snyder reports for CIO. “On Monday, Oct. 20, Hall-Lefevre, McDonald’s vice president and CIO of U.S. Information Technology, is going to flip a switch and all of the fast food chain’s roughly 14,000 domestic outlets and drive-thrus will go live with Apple Pay.”
“Hall-Lefevre is responsible for the development and execution of the company’s technology strategy in the United States and is the point person for the Apple Pay deployment. Getting corporate signoff for it was not difficult, she says,” Snyder reports. “It was a coordinated effort that included IT and marketing, along with senior level executives including Atif Rafiq, McDonald’s global digital officer; the company’s global CIO, Jim Sappington; and CEO Don Thompson”
“‘Apple Pay is riding on our existing rails. When the customer decides to use [another] mobile wallet or Apple Pay, it works like any other cashless transaction,’ Hall-Lefevre says,” Snyder reports. “The terminals sit next to cash registers at the restaurants, and employees hold them out to customers at drive-thru windows. Apple Pay users just link their credit cards to the iOS Passbook app, then hold their phones up to a terminal to pay while touching the fingerprint reader for authentication. A vibration and a beep let customers know when transactions are complete.”
“McDonald’s is so confident in Apple’s security that it is not using any safeguards beyond those provided by Apple and the rest of the financial payments network,” Snyder reports. “Sandy Shen, a Shanghai-based analyst who follows mobile payments for Gartner, agrees. “The combination of Touch ID [Apple’s fingerprint reader], secure element and tokenization makes the security stronger than cloud-based mobile payments used by in-app payment today. I don’t see it as necessary for retailers to take additional measures, and [they] can accept Apple Pay as they do for other payments today.'””
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Apple Pay launches today and retail will never be the same – October 20, 2014
Super Size Me!
MacDonalds and other junk food chains use chemical taste enforces such as monosodium glutamate that literally make you addicted to it. All those chemicals also make you intake more food than you would normally do. As side effect, it makes you fat and in some cases ruin you kidney and liver. WHO’s research show that eating in junk food chains is as poisonous as smoking.
So, people, even if it is already too late for you please at least do not bring children to those horrible places.
Besides, Ronald MacDonald is the single scariest and creepiest creature I have ever seen. Spare your children from the nightmares. I am not even a child, but it freaks me out.
McDonald’s no longer uses MSG in their products. Other flavor enhancers perhaps – but not MSG.
Good news; however, it depends on region. Their chemistry institutes work 24/7 to come up with even more addictive taste enhancers that are not directly forbidden yet.
Junk food industries’ issue is that their food is so beaten-to-death-processed, that it can not have colour and taste of actual food unless you use chemical industry for that, as well as ammonia and other nice things that would ensure that you will not die from deadly bacteria from their meat houses.
Quoting/citing WHO doesn’t exactly make it truth.
WHO has buried reports before cause the result wasn’t what they wanted.
In some cases, yes. But there is no doubt that junk food companies hate those reports, it was not easy to produce them. The history repeats itself — junk food chains act just like tobacco manufacturers few decades ago.
Actually, WHO hid a tobacco report cause it didn’t end with the result they wanted..
I rarely eat McDonalds anyway, never liked their fries and the burgers have no taste to me..
Those wraps they have now are decent.
I just did a MSG search… lol. they name almost every thing out there as loaded with MSG.
Chicken, beef, pork, soup, tuna, turkey, dressing, parmesan, croutons, list goes on..
Basically you have to eat Tofu and cardboard. (which tastes the same)
A local gut bomb burger joint has the best damn fries.. I’m hungry, think i’m going to get an extra large bag of them. And their triple decker beef and ham burger. Large Diet Mtn Dew, and maybe a Pumpkin Pie shake on the side. (tis the season) 😉
Interesting factoid: MSG was originally an extract from Seaweed discovered in Japan when researching what made certain foods “taste” better. Most modern MSG is chemically produced, but it isn’t this weird alien substance. It’s simply a chemical equivalent to the natural substance found in certain seaweeds.
Common preservatives are also come from nature.
The point is that those chemicals are artificially produced and introduced into food where they did not belong, let alone other the quantity they use.
Monosodium glutamate is the sodium salt of glutamic acid. Glutamate is a naturally occurring amino acid that is found in nearly all foods, especially high protein foods such as dairy products, meat and fish and in many vegetables. Foods often used for their flavouring properties, such as mushrooms and tomatoes, have high levels of naturally occurring glutamate.
The human body also produces glutamate and it plays an essential role in normal body functioning. Do some research.
As I explained above, junk food industries have to use taste and colour enhancers because the processing they uses leaves no taste or colour to their food. Besides, they use not just taste additives, but addictive ones, like monosodium glutamate (or others in regions where it is banned) — in the types of food where they never belonged in the quantities they added. Do some research.
Retailers who don’t jump on this are going to regret it within 6-12 months, if not sooner. People will demand it, especially once they understand the quantum leap forward in security that Pay offers. It virtually eliminates someone being able to steal your credit card info, and thereby eliminates a major weakness that opens people up to identity theft.
And as a result our credit card interest rates will go down!! …sorry. I just lost my head for a second.
It may not do that, but competition should mean that if ApplePay is profitable, there will be better perks.
Pay your credit card in full every month. I don’t care how high my interest rate is, since I never pay interest. I get a free average 15 day loan, plus cash back!
I refuse to shop anywhere that won’t support Apple Pay.
That is going to seriously limit your shopping choices. None of the grocery chains in my area support Apple Pay.
I was the first to use Apple Pay at my local McDonalds using my Wells Fargo debit card.
Whilst Apple pay has yet to roll out globally, when it does, I will use Apple pay as my default form of payment then. 🙂
Cash is still my king for little transactions, whilst cards are king as far as large ticket items that I want insured by the card issuer are concerned.
Sounds like Deborah is one smart lady.
Mcdonalds is sell $5-$10 meals, so the decision from a security stand point should be easy. It’s not like they are selling diamonds or $2499 iMacs.
Went into McDonald’s today and asked if they had Apple Pay. The girl behind the counter responded, “Do we have any apple pie?” I’m not sure she was ready for this.
Apple Pay isn’t available in Canada yet. ;p
I don’t get it. I’m so confused. Will somebody please clear this up?
I keep hearing that merchants don’t have to “support Apple Pay”, that any merchant with contactless (i.e. NFC) payments enabled can already take it. Then I read articles like this one.
So which is it? Can I go into any merchant with an NFC terminal and pay with my iPhone? Or only those who have “decided to support” Apple Pay?
(McDonalds has had NFC terminals at their restaurants for years. If Apple Pay “just works” with any NFC terminal, isn’t this a non-story?)
——RM