“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.
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Apple Pay launches today and retail will never be the same – October 20, 2014