“The Apple Pay payment experience has been simple and elegant. No network connection needed. No need to find an app, launch an app or log in,” Evan Schuman writes for Computerworld. “Just hold the phone at the end of the transaction, place your finger ever so briefly on the button for a split second, and a comforting ‘Done’ icon says you’re finished. At least that was true until last week, when several major chains made their official EMV move.”
“Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods were among the major retailers that switched on EMV last week, which instantly made the quick Apple Pay experience decidedly less so,” Schuman writes. “Instead of the shopper being done when Apple Pay confirmed all that it needed to confirm (which is pretty much the purchase amount and that your fingerprint matches the one you are supposed to have), a series of new messages pop out on the POS screen.”
“The problem here is that although POS systems know that an NFC transaction is contactless, those systems often do not know much or even anything beyond that. The POS has no idea if a biometric authentication was completed, so it needs to ask for the signature. The POS has no idea whether the shopper was shown an amount — and certainly not whether the shopper really thought about it — so it must show it again and demand a confirmation,” Schuman writes. “The only relevant detail here is that Apple Pay… and other secure NFC payment wallets are going to have their customer experiences seriously degraded because of EMV rules and visibility limits within today’s payments systems.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: SNAFU.