“One of the most interesting, least talked about wars in tech is turning into a rout,” Jacob Davidson reports for Money. “Ever since Apple launched Apple Pay last year, the iPhone maker has been waging battle against an unexpected competitor: Walmart. And America’s largest retailer is losing badly.”
“A host of major retailers including Walmart, Target, and CVS… formed a coalition called Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX for short) and vowed to create their own payment service that would compete with credit-card companies,” Davidson reports. “Unfortunately for Walmart, it wasn’t the only one trying to revolutionize how consumers pay for goods. When Apple blew the doors off the mobile payment world last October with the release of Apple Pay, MCX’s payment app, known as CurrentC, was still deep in the testing phase. Worst of all for Walmart and friends, Apple was partnering with the very credit-card payment networks they had hoped to destroy.”
“Now, seven months after Apple Pay debuted, the retailers are still struggling to hold the line,” Davidson reports. “MCX member BestBuy recently announced it would start accepting Apple Pay, and Dekkers Davidson, the group’s chief executive, resigned one day later ‘to pursue other opportunities.” But the internal strife distracts from MCX’s biggest failure: The collective has thus far proved unable to get its app into the marketplace.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: MCX’s convoluted system is DOA.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dominink P.” for the heads up.]