“Apple on Tuesday updated the list of U.S. Apple Pay card issuers with 58 more financial institutions, putting the company over the 900 mark and within sight of hitting 1,000 later this year,” Roger Fingas reports for AppleInsider.
“The expanded list includes a mix conventional banks and credit unions, as has become standard for Apple,” Fingas reports. “There don’t appear to be any major additions, with most of the new entries being highly localized.”
“The bulk of Apple Pay expansion efforts remain focused on the U.S., even with the service also present in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom,” Fingas reports. “It will come to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Spain later this year however, as well as mainland China thanks to a deal with China UnionPay.”
Full list of new Apple Pay card issuers here.
MacDailyNews Take: Slowly but surely, Apple Pay wends it way into everyday life!
SEE ALSO:
Pay Finders app for finding Apple Pay locations reports 750% increase in users in two days – December 28, 2015
Why Apple’s revolutionary Apple Pay is going to be absolutely enormous – December 18, 2015
Apple Pay to take on Tencent’s WeChat Wallet and Alipay in China – December 18, 2015
Apple partners with UnionPay to launch Apple Pay in China – December 17, 2015
But why don’t more establishments accept Apple Pay.
I would use it every time I could, but so few places accept it.
Maybe Apple can do some type of promotion for establishments that accept it and display an “Apple Pay” sign.
Many places accept it and don’t know it. After all, all you have to do to accept Apple Pay is have credit card terminals with NFC, and to have that NFC functionality turned on. That’s it. I’ve held up my phone to card terminals that have no symbol on them indicating that they accept Apple Pay/NFC/contactless/whatever, and seen the phone light up and send the payment.
——RM
I just found a convenience store/fishing bait shop in my area that takes Apple Pay! Time to go fishing…
I use Apple Pay everywhere I can, and thankfully many of my close local businesses are now taking it. I’ve been using the Pay Finders app to discover more places and provide input in the app to (I think) get Pay Finders to invite new businesses to accept it. Great little app.
Come on credit unions!!
It works flawlessly, but the adoption rate is very low, both among the consumers, and more importantly, retailers.
The main question here is what are Apple’s plans for this. It is clearly a differentiator, since Google Pay simply doesn’t even begin to approach it in terms of intuitive use and reliability, not to mention security. From a consumer’s angle, the system is very practical and convenient (phone is always more easily accessible than a credit card, which is always in a wallet, which is in a pocket / purse).
The transition from magstripe to chip-n-pin technology has been more-or-less botched in America. The deadline was 1st October, but many merchants are still only accepting magstripe swipes, even with devices that have a chip reader, and even when PoS device has a NFC reader (!!??). The fierce resistance in both these sectors is baffling. The annual losses due to credit card fraud are over $14 Billion (with a ‘B’), more than half of which happens in the US (even though the share of credit card transactions in the US is much smaller). The rest of the world had long ago moved to chip-n-pin authentication (where user inserts a credit card with a memory chip, and must authenticate with at 4-digit PIN). America has only now started moving in that direction, but the card issuers are defeating the concept by not even requiring PIN — just insert the card and you’re done! Instead, they require signature, even though 85% of fraudulent credit card transactions had a “verified” signature.
Banks and retailers were sharing literally all of the burden of the fraud, with banks shouldering two thirds (physical swipes), and retailers one third (online or phone orders, no card present). Retailers spend almost half a billion every year on fraud prevention, and banks twice as much (almost a full billion). And yet, they keep resisting introduction of chip-n-PIN, let alone Apple Pay.
With fingerprint authentication, you don’t need to be an engineer to understand that ApplePay literally guarantees 100% fraud prevention. You would think that the banks, and even retailers, would jump on the opportunity to reduce their annual losses. Unfortunately, the actual share of that loss in the total credit card commerce is rather negligible (0.0005%, or $0.05 for every $100). If your small business turns $500k every year, your losses are $2,500. Changing your PoS systems to accept ApplePay won’t automatically eliminate those $2.5k next year; it may reduce the amount, but not necessarily enough to make it worth while.
Speaking of requiring signature, I can’t imagine what is the reasoning behind it and how does it make the transaction safer. No store clerk is trained to compare signatures and detect forgery. Once the transaction is complete and the perpetrator walks away with the goods, the money has already changed hands and that signature is worthless as is the piece of paper it was signed on. I often see people who ‘sign’ the electronic pad using a straight line, or a circle, or something abstract that obviously isn’t their actual signature. No clerk has EVER compared the signature from the back of my card to the one on the receipt I had just signed.
The ‘Verified signature’ requirement is the most absurd and pointless exercise that remains alive ONLY in America. The rest of the world is using chip and PIN.
ApplePay is the ultimate solution, but we’ll have to wait for quite a while before it becomes mainstream. Apple still doesn’t care much about it; if they do, they are hiding it very well.
That’s all fine and dandy, and Apple can add 10,000 more banks and card issuers, but the only places I can use it are at Walgreens (CVS lost my business over Apple Pay) and McDonalds. I upgraded to iPhone 6s primarily for Apple Pay, so this was a needless expense and very disappointing.
Come on, Redstone Federal, get with the program.
Sent from my iPhone
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