In a January earnings call with investors, Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook made a confident prediction: “2015 will be the year of Apple Pay,” he said. Since then, the company has aggressively courted retailers – and claimed significant success. “We’ve spoken to all of the top 100 merchants in the U.S., and about half will accept Apple Pay this year, with many more the following year,” a company spokesperson recently told Reuters.
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Google may be unveiling a new mobile payments platform called Android Pay at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco. It should be well integrated with Google’s Android mobile operating system, and could very well beat Apple Pay in its features and functionality. [Read more…]
Kiosks at Trader Joe’s checkout counters across the U.S. have been seeing upgrades in recent weeks and months to VeriFone touchscreen machines. Some of these payment terminals already advertise that they accept Apple Pay, as seen above at a store in Raleigh, spotted by AppleInsider.Not all stores have yet enabled support for Apple Pay, even if the new VeriFone terminals are installed. For example, a trip Friday afternoon to the Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn revealed that Apple Pay is not yet being accepted, and a check-out clerk mentioned that support is forthcoming at an unknown date. [Read more…]
During a recent visit to China, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple is moving forward with talks to roll out Apple Pay in partnership with regional banks and perhaps e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.
Dekkers Davidson, CEO of Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), developer of the CurrentC mobile payment platform, is leaving the company. MCX has announced the appointment of financial services and payment industry veteran Brian V. Mooney as the company’s Interim Chief Executive Officer. Mooney succeeds Dekkers Davidson, who is leaving MCX to pursue other opportunities. The move comes on the heels of an increasing number of competitive players in the mobile payments field, and the recent announcement during Apple’s earnings call that Best Buy is poised to break from exclusivity with CurrentC and begin supporting Apple Pay. CurrentC merchants Home Depot and Acme also have plans to accept Apple Pay. [Read more…]
Discover today announced an agreement with Apple that will allow Discover cardmembers in the U.S. to make contactless payments in participating stores through Apple Pay. [Read more…]
Six months after the release of Apple Pay, how is Apple doing? Early consumer surveys of iPhone users reveal that few users have both enabled a card on the app and gone ahead to make a purchase with it. Worse, few retailers seem to support Near Field Communication, or NFC, payments—just 700,000 locations according to Apple’s latest reckoning. Will lack of avenues to use Apple Pay at the point of sale doom its likelihood of becoming the iPhone user’s payment method of choice? [Read more…]
Well, that didn’t take long! A new survey from 451 Research finds Apple Pay gaining momentum in the mobile payments space, surpassing both PayPal and Google Wallet.
“Our latest survey shows planned use of Apple Pay has been on an upward trajectory since it became available six months ago – with the service helping to spark consumer demand for mobile payment technologies,” said Andy Golub, Survey Research Director for 451 Research. “Although consumer perceptions of security remain an issue, the results point to marked improvements in this area.”
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Starbucks created a lot of buzz about mobile payments when the company release it’s popular mobile payment app in 2011, and indeed Starbucks was on the vanguard of consumer retail mobile payments. And by most measures the Starbucks app should be considered a success. CEO Howard Schultz told investors during a recent earnings call: “Today in the U.S. alone over 13 million customers are actively using our mobile apps and we’re now averaging over 7 million mobile transactions in our stores each week, representing roughly 16% of total tender, more than any other bricks and mortar retailer in the marketplace.” That’s impressive.
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