“Place your bets now, consumers. The mobile payment wars have officially begun,” H.O. Maycotte writes for Forbes.
“Will it be CurrentC, a payment method based on a QR code, to be used by the likes of Walmart, CVS, and Rite-Aid, of which these retailers account for $1 trillion in annual sales?” Maycotte writes. “Or, will it be Apple Pay and Google Wallet, payment methods that rely on near-field communications (NFC), a service that had more than 1 million credit cards enrolled within 72 hours of Apple Pay’s launch?”
MacDailyNews Take: Google Wallet is a joke. It should never be placed alongside Apple Pay as some sort of an equal (as Maycotte unfortunately does throughout his article). This was (and still is) perpetrated by far too many in the media with Android.
Elevating something by placing it in sentences as some sort of equal to Apple’s offering (Walt Mossberg did this constantly with Android during his last years at WSJ and earned our scorn. Perhaps he was instructed by his WSJ editors to do so, since he seems to have backed off this wrongheaded stance in his post-WSJ Re/code reviews).
This “false equivalence” ends up deluding the general public and diluting the power of Apple’s products and services. We will point this out when it is attempted with Apple Pay. Just as iPhone has no equal, just as iPad has no equal, and just as Macintosh has no equal, Apple Pay has no equal – certainly not the joke that is Google Wallet.
In just one week, Apple Pay has already facilitated more transactions than all other ‘contact less’ payment methods combined! (Which shows how much of an epic faceplant Google Wallet has been – it was released over three years ago on September 19, 2011.)
“Customer data is crucial for retailers, which is why the era of big data is so drastically transforming that industry. With data, retailers can holistically understand their customer, what drives them to buy, what products they may be looking for discounts on, which competitors may be winning their business during different seasons, sales or the like. With such data, retailers can market personalized incentives to customers, increase engagement and loyalty and ideally become a customer’s ‘Why would I shop anywhere else’ store,” Maycotte writes. “Think of CurrentC as providing retailers the ability to utilize data-driven marketing campaigns. Using CurrentC, retailers will receive your name, email, purchase history and more. The app will then share, or more likely sell, that data with retailers willing to buy in. And, you will agree to all of this in the terms of service, probably without realizing it.”
“Apple Pay doesn’t allow retailers access to this type of data detail, which is likely why so many large chains are boycotting it. Instead, Apple will not share any of the data collected during purchases with retailers. None of it. It isn’t even clear how Apple will use all of that data itself,” Maycotte writes. “In the end, the lines in the sand couldn’t be any clearer. Apple Pay, or any payment utilizing NFC technology, is the safer bet for consumers.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Boycott non-cash payment systems from any company that willfully turns off NFC in an effort to block the vastly more secure, much more private, and far easier-to-use Apple Pay service.
