“While we are going to have to wait a little longer for Apple to launch payments in iMessage, this weekend, Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s VP of Apple Pay, announced a series of other milestones for the digital wallet and payments service,” Ingrid Lunden reports for TechCrunch.
“The advances point to how Apple wants to steal a march when it comes to using phones as a proxy for a card or cash, and there is some anecdotal evidence that it’s working,” Lunden reports. “Merchants and others who have partnered with Apple say that Apple Pay is accounting for 90 percent of all mobile contactless transactions globally in markets where it’s available.”
"Apple Pay is the future of the everyday spend" – Jennifer Bailey, Vice President of Internet Services at Apple Pay @money2020 #Money2020 pic.twitter.com/B6N0Pn0q0Q
— Alara (@alarabasul) October 23, 2017
“Bailey also announced that the service is launching in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the UAE in the next few days, bringing the total number of countries where it is used up to 20. And she said that 4,000 issuers worldwide now work with the wallet,” Lunden reports. “While these may not sound like a massive numbers on their own, 20 markets represents a full 70 percent of the world’s card transaction volume, she noted.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We have been using Apple Pay multiple times per day for quite some time now – thanks, Apple Watch (it’s the best way to Apple Pay)- and it is no longer a rarity to see others using it in stores with their iPhone and Apple Watches, too!
Apple Pay coming to Finland (offered by the Nordea bank) was actually the number one story today in Finland’s Broadcasting Companys main news (every day at 20:30pm), it beat for example the state visit of the polish president – not bad, not bad at all:D
MDN title cut off “Mobile” from the original title.. Seemed way off what would be the total market of contactless payments that include the NFC cards, and feature phones that charge directly to the phone bill.
Still waiting for Home Depot to turn Apple Pay back on after disabling it years ago ….
One good sign — cashiers are no longer surprised when you pay with ApplePay, it is ‘normal’.
And you now typically get a firm yes or no answer, instead of a blank stare or “I don’t know,” when you ask, “Do you accept Apple Pay?”
It is a rarity, though. I’d love to see what the numbers are for contactless payments outside of large east or west coast cities. I do business in public places throughout the year, and though I’m sure they occur here and there, I have yet to personally see a single instance of Apple Pay anywhere I’ve been in-between, and certainly not by non-geeks in the places they are more prevalent. Thus far contactless payment seems to be in the same league Glass occupied, for the most part. I *do* see people using Square a whole lot, though with their cards, not their devices, it has sort of supplanted PayPal. It is also worth noting that a lot of people still use cash – I’ve had a pretty equal amount of Square and cash sales for 2017. Not a single Apple Pay transaction, not one. I think a lot of people feel that if it’s linked to their card anyway, they may as well just use the card. This may end up being one of those things that wasn’t really broken – Apple seems to excel at providing solutions in search of problems of late, and that is relatively new for them.